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The Jewish settlers and Israel as a matter of policy condoning-violence-policy is to be blamed
Ethnically Cleansed Palestinian Refugees on their way to Lebanon, October, 1948. photo/Palestine remembered
Well he goes to blame the current situation to the leaders of Palestine for the anger that is uncontrollable and has been displaced by the Palestinian youth mostly in recent incidents. Worth mentioning that only part of the stabbings did really happened as published by Palestinian news and other outlets, the rest of the Palestinians killed have been staged by the settlers filled with their common hate for any Arab; Christian or Muslim. And even there is an incident that a settler confused the darker skin of an individual for Palestinian and it was a Jew. Last Thursday, The New York Post said that 31 Palestinians were killed recently from which only, 14 were recognized as attackers, according to mathematics the other 17 were indeed executed
Palestinians have been living in Palestine for centuries as history records.
If you like recorded history and want to learn more about Palestine, I invite you to visit Palestine Remembered where you can watch videos of interviews from Palestinians and Jews before the creation of the political entity Israel, photos of villages all gone now, stories of battles and more.”The CORE issues of the Palestinian-Israeli are the collective dispossession and ethnic cleansing (compulsory population transfer to achieve political objectives) of the Palestinian people for the past six decades. In our opinion, the conflict would have been at the same level of intensity even if both parties had been Jewish, Muslims, or Christians. ” PalestineRemembered.com
Golberg repeats the same mantra that is being distributed by the Streaming Media: “Netayahu has said that the State of Israel is not trying to change the Status Quo.”
But what is the “Status Quo”?
Are check points the Status Quo?
“Each checkpoint looks like a military zone, consisting of a guard tower, a pedestrian waiting area, and two car lanes: one with a long wait for Palestinian cars and a special open car lane for Israeli cars. ” Electronic Intifada 2004
Palestinian Muslim males over 45 not allow to enter Jerusalem.
The South Africa pass laws implemented in Israel are kicking and running. Palestinians need to secure a permit to move around the occupied territories. If Israel feels like it, it won’t grant a permit.
Palestinians are not allowed to freely move in Palestine at all. Shuhada Street in Hebron is one of the best examples of living under a military dictatorship occupation. Shuhada Street is close for Palestinians but Jews can freely walk and harass the Palestinians residents that live on Shuhada street but need to leave their homes thru a hole on the roof.
Jerusalem is only open on Friday and males 55+, women 45+ after IOF clearance.
People living in Gaza are not allow to enter West Bank at all, actually the refugee camp of Gaza is a deportation camp. Families are completely separated.
Palestinian protesters and IDF soldiers at the beginning of the weekly protest near Bil’in. The apartment houses of Modi’in Ilit can be seen in the distance. March 30 2013 (photo: Noam Sheizaf)
And also do not forget that the violence is not only in Jerusalem but in all the occupied territories including the modern concentration camp of Gaza which has been blocked from the rest of the world for almost 10 years.
So, people do not swallow the pill that this is a religious war, is not.Goldberg makes an excellent surgical extraction of the truth to portray the Israel’s side of the story.
For people that only follows the main stream media news, Goldberg’s piece is an excellent source to stay uninformed, misinformed and with this stripping Palestinian of all their humanity and right to fight for their existence in the only way they know; throwing rocks and now using kitchen knives.
Remember Israel has tanks, F16s, Apache Helicopters, Drones, War ships to attack Gaza, in other words Israel has all the defense gadgets and Palestinians has none but stones and knives. The fact that Palestine has been invaded many times in history does not mean it did not exist before United Nations decided to partition the land in 1947. It does not means either that the violence started on 1947. It only means that Palestinians have been peaceful people that never wonder outside of their land, they have been farmers and shepherds, not conquerors.Further reading Survey of Palestine by British Mandate 1200 pages report includes 1917-1945
Celebrities for Palestine part of the peacemaking process; Jen Marlowe
Sami al Jundi (left) collaborated with writer and friend Jen Marlowe (right) on his autobiography, together crafting what one Israeli writer called “the most authentic account of the Palestinian refugees’ painful ordeal that I have ever read.” Credit: Nation Books.
Jen Marlowe is a Seattle-based award-winning author/documentary filmmaker/playwright and human rights activist.
It takes humility to feel peoples struggles and pains and witnessing Palestinian struggles is more than enough to feel the necessity to want to be a bridge for peace. Marlowe uses her writing to give solutions to the Israeli/Palestinian violence.
“On July 28, at least eight children in Gaza were killed when a playground was shelled. Entire extended families—children included—have been wiped out. According to Save the Children, one-third of those injured in Gaza are children and tens of thousands more have been displaced from their homes, or have lost homes that were damaged or destroyed,” said Marlowe on Rays of Hope in Gaza
The reality has never been so grim, she said, And yet, in the midst of this darkness, there are Israelis and Palestinians who are working tirelessly for an end to bloodshed, and to all forms of violence—including the structural violence of the occupation/siege, Marlowe said.
Marlowe began her professional life working at Seattle Children’s Theatre; from 1994-2000, she did youth theatre work in Seattle, using theatre as a platform for students to tell their stories.
Marlowe lived and worked in Jerusalem several years, using some of these same techniques to engage in dialogue-based conflict resolution with Palestinian and Israeli teenagers. Jen also did conflict resolution work with youth in Afghanistan, Cyprus, India, Pakistan and Bosnia-Herzegovina. It was while working with youth in conflict areas that she first picked up a video camera—at that time, in order to record messages being exchanged between Israeli and Palestinian youth. As the youth themselves pushed the video dialogue project to more complex realms, Jen began to explore the idea of how film can be used, not only as a tool of dialogue, but also as a tool of activism. In 2004, with colleagues Adam Shapiro and Aisha Bain, Jen traveled to Northern Darfur and Eastern Chad to make the award-winning documentary film Darfur Diaries: Message from Home and wrote the accompanying book Darfur Diaries: Stories of Survival (Nation Books, 2006). Darfur Diaries was included in the 2007 edition of the Best American Non-Required Reading, edited by Dave Eggers.
Jen’s second feature-length award-winning documentary is called Rebuilding Hope: Sudan’s Lost Boys Return Home. Rebuilding Hope follows three Sudanese-American young men on their first homecoming trip back to Sudan, to discover whether their homes and families survived the civil war and to build a school, drill wells and bring medical supplies to their villages in Sudan.
Jen’s second book, called The Hour of Sunlight: One Palestinian’s Journey from Prisoner to Peacemaker (Nation Books, 2011), is co-authored with and tells the story of Sami Al Jundi, a Palestinian man who spent ten years in Israeli prison for being involved in militant anti-occupation activities as a youth and who has spent the last two decades of his life working towards nonviolence and peaceful reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians.The Hour of Sunlight was the winner of the London-based Middle East Monitor’s Palestine Book Award in 2012.
EU consuls recommend imposing sanctions on Israeli settlements
Nonbinding Heads of Mission report for 2012 focuses on Israeli construction in E-1, policy in East Jerusalem and endangering of two-state solution; call to actively encourage European divestment from settlements is particularly severe.
Among the recommendations made in the nonbinding Heads of Mission report for 2012, which has been obtained by Haaretz, is to “prevent, discourage and raise awareness about problematic implications of financial transactions including foreign direct investments, from within the EU in support of settlement activities, infrastructure and services.”
Seven of the report’s 10 recommendations deal with imposing direct or indirect sanctions by the European Union on bodies and organizations involved in construction in the settlements. The recommendation to actively encourage European divestment from the settlements is particularly severe, compared with previous internal EU reports.
The consuls recommend that the EU ensure strict application of the free trade agreement between the EU and Israel so that products manufactured in settlements do not benefit from preferential treatment. Another clause recommends encouraging efforts to enforce existing legislation requiring products made in the settlements to be labeled as such at sales points.
Efforts must be made to “ensure that imports of settlement products do not benefit from preferential tariffs and guarantee the consumers’ right to an informed choice” with regard to the origin and labeling of products, the report states. The annual mission report, which is written by all the heads of diplomatic missions of EU member states in the Palestinian Authority, does not compel practical steps, but serves as a basis for internal discussions of the Israel-Palestinian situation.
The 2012 report, which was handed in early January to the EU institutions in Brussels and to the foreign ministries of the 27 member states, also advocates closer supervision of cooperative programs between the EU and Israel with regard to technological research and development to ensure that no research grants, scholarships or other technological investments assist settlements, either directly or indirectly.
The diplomats gave the example of Israel’s participation in a cooperative program called Horizon 2020, through which the EU invests hundreds of millions of euros in Israeli high-tech firms. They noted that some of this funding goes to firms like the research laboratories of the cosmetics company Ahava, which are located in the Jordan Valley kibbutz Mitzpeh Shalem, near the Dead Sea. If the EU consuls’ recommendations are accepted, such investments will stop, since the kibbutz is seen as a settlement.
The report takes Israel to task over the decision to move ahead on construction plans in Area E-1, the corridor meant to link Jerusalem to the nearby West Bank settlement of Ma’aleh Adumim. The decision was made in late November, after the Palestinians’ statehood bid in the United Nations. The implementation of the E-1 project “threatens 2,300 Bedouin with forcible transfer” and “would effectively divide the West Bank into separate northern and southern parts,” the report states, adding that it would also “prevent Palestinians in East Jerusalem from further urban development and cut off East Jerusalem from the rest of the West Bank.”
The consuls recommend to the EU member states to “coordinate EU monitoring and a strong EU response in order to prevent settlement construction in E1, including opposing forced transfer of the Bedouin communities in E1.”
The consuls state that the continuation of Israel’s policy in East Jerusalem could thwart the possibility of the city serving as the Israeli and Palestinian capital and therefore put the entire two-state solution at risk.
According to the report, Israel is “systematically undermining the Palestinian presence” in Jerusalem, through policies including “restrictive zoning and planning, demolitions and evacuations, discriminatory access to religious sites, an inequitable education policy, difficult access to health care, the inadequate provision of resources.”
A large portion of the report deals with Israeli restrictions on Muslim and Christian religious practice in Jerusalem and accuses Israel of attempting to change the character of Jerusalem as a city sacred to the three faiths. The Israeli government “selectively enforces legal and policy restrictions on religious freedoms and on access in particular for Christian and Muslim worshippers to their holy sites in Jerusalem/Old City,” the report states.
The consuls direct special attention to the cooperation between the right-wing group Elad and the Israel Antiquities Authority, determining that the purpose of this collaboration is to promote “a partisan historical narrative, placing emphasis on the biblical and Jewish connotations of the area while neglecting the Christian/Muslim claims of historic-archaeological ties to the same place.”
The authors said it seems that an attempt is being made to use archaeology to erase Muslim and Christian connections to the city, and that the “overreaching purpose of such a pre-programmed approach to the presence of archaeological evidence in the area seems to be a concerted effort by pro-settler groups to use archaeology to enhance an exclusively Jewish narrative on Jerusalem.”
The consuls say 2012 saw a rise in the number of violent incidents on the Temple Mount and a sharp increase in “the frequency and visibility of visits by Jewish radical political and religious groups, often in a provocative manner.” According to the report, the Palestinians fear that Israel is trying to change the status quo on the Temple Mount and create “Hebronization” there by arrangements similar to those in force at the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron.
In the report the consuls say that construction of Jewish neighborhoods in East Jerusalem is “systematic, deliberate and provocative” and presents as an example Israel’s announcement that 3,000 new housing units were approved by the government, a statement that came shortly after the Palestinians had their UN status upgraded to non-member observer state.
The consuls noted in particular three construction plans they view as problematic: the eastward expansion of the Jerusalem neighborhood of Har Homa, the southward and westward expansion of Gilo and housing construction in the Givat Hamatos neighborhood in between.
“The construction of these three settlements is part of a political strategy aiming at making it impossible for Jerusalem to become the capital of two states,” the report states.
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