More Israeli apartheid laws are being enacted and others being enforced. A new law will punish Palestinians using yellow-plated (“Israeli”) cars (including taxis) and punish the drivers unless they have special permits from Israeli occupation authorities. A Palestinian getting a ride even from a friend or a relative (or even an Israeli spouse) will get them both punished. The law was enacted and will go into effect in January. Israel also is proceeding with other laws intended to ethnically cleanse Palestine of a key segment of its remaining population and deny any international support to Palestinians. An apartheid law is being implemented removing Palestinians, including those born in Palestine, who hold foreign passports (and who were unable to retain or get the Israeli issued ID card, other set of apartheid laws stripped thousands of their ID cards). Tens of thousands of Palestinians thus were denied their residency rights and families are forced to either separate or find other countries to live in. This coincides with accelerated plans to de-develop the remaining Palestinain economy by a system of strangulation. For example, Palestinians in Jerusalem are being separated by massive walls from Palestinians in the suburbs of Jerusalem (imagine the devastation to both suburbs and city in America if a wall is built around the city separating it from these suburbs). BTW Bethlehem and Ramallah are each within 10 mile radius of Jerusalem old city and are thus suburbs. Unemployment in the West Bank (including Jerusalem) is now at 70% and over 50% of Palestinians who remained in Palestine live in poverty. 80% of Palestinians overall are refugees or displaced people (the largest and longest lasting among the world’s refugees).
Foreigners are also now routinely denied entry to Palestine. This is intended to remove witnesses and peace activists from the deepening apartheid/hafrada. How will we respond and will the hundreds of organizations around the US (and thousands around the world) that profess support for human rights rise to this challenge? Will governments be forced to obey the International Covenant against Crimes of Apartheid and Racism? Will more people write regularly to the media to demand they do their job and report the real news, not racist PR?
A new e-Book/Book on the Web explores some of the Israeli apartheid laws and practices:
“Foundations of Civil and Political Rights in Israel and the Occupied Territories“
http://www.flwi.ugent.be/cie/yschmidt/index.htm
The Niggerization of Palestine
http://www.blackagendareport.com/002/002h_js_niggerization_of_palestine.html
25 Leading Professors from major academic institutions in Germany explain “Why the ‘special relationship’ between Germany and Israel has to be reconsidered”
http://www.tlaxcala.es/pp.asp?lg=en&reference=1569
Swedish human rights worker viciously attacked by Jewish extremists in Hebron “Tove Johansson from Stockholm walked through the Tel Rumeida checkpoint with a small group of human rights workers (HRWs) to accompany Palestinian schoolchildren to their homes. They were confronted by about 100 Jewish extremists in small groups. They started chanting in Hebrew “We killed Jesus, we’ll kill you too!” – a refrain the settlers had been repeating to internationals in Tel Rumeida all day…..”
http://www.palsolidarity.org/main/2006/11/18/hebron-day-06/
Palestinian mass resistance blocks Israeli air strike Palestinians have started to employ new tactics to prevent Israeli air attacks on their houses. Hundreds of protesters successfully forced the Israeli air force to halt air strikes on a house belonging to Muhammad Baroud in Beit Lahiya in the northern Gaza Strip on Saturday night.
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article6074.shtml
Picture Balata: Outside the West Bank City of Nablus lies the Balata Refugee Camp. Home to almost 25,000 residents living on less than one square kilometer, Balata is the most densely populated refugee camp within the West Bank. In recent years Balata has seen hundreds of deaths and arrests, dozens of home demolitions and the camp is subject to near nightly invasions by the Israeli army. It is here that the Picture Balata workshop was started to teach youth from the camp about photography. Picture Balata puts the camera into the hands of the children born and raised inside the ongoing Israeli occupation of Palestine.
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article6067.shtml
Israeli Zionist Group on Israeli settlements/colonies in the occupied West Bank: “More than a third of the Jewish settlements in the West Bank are built on privately owned Palestinian land, an Israeli campaign group has reported. Peace Now says nearly 40% of the land the settlements sit on is, according to official data, “effectively stolen” from Palestinian landowners. This, the group says, is a violation of Israel’s own laws. Settlements in the occupied West Bank are illegal under international law, although Israel rejects this. About 430,000 Jews live in these residential areas in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Peace Now called on the Israeli government to return the private land to its owners.”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/6168752.stm
Mazin
http://qumsiyeh.org
http://www.wheelsofjusticetour.org
No more hitching in the W. Bank
Amira Hass, 22 November 2006, Ha’aretz
The OC Central Command, Yair Naveh, dropped a cluster bomb early this week. He signed an order barring Israeli citizens from taking Palestinian passengers in their Israeli vehicles within the West Bank. The order will take effect on January 19, 2007 and it exempts those who take Palestinians with permits to enter Israel and the settlements, or those who take their first-degree relatives with them.
The reason for the new order, as noted in the IDF Spokesperson’s announcement, is of course, security: to impede those who want “to perpetrate terrorist attacks on the home front of the State of Israel and in the Judea, Samaria and Jordan Valley regions.” Therefore, the order sounds like a standard IDF shell whose objective is “self-defense,” but in practice it is another component in the regime of national and ethnic separation that exists in the West Bank, a regime of privileges for the Jewish settler minority, at the expense of the Palestinians’ individual and national rights. Like other military orders and Knesset laws, which are cleverly cloaked in the guise of the security argument, this order, too, sheds cluster bombs that will continue to destroy the remaining chance of establishing Peace-relations with the Palestinians. [More]