Parts 2-17

“To shoot an elephant” website.

Institute for Public Accuracy
News Release
11 March 2010

Wednesday, Vice President Joe Biden said: “I condemn the decision by the government of Israel to advance planning for new housing units in East Jerusalem.” He also stated that the U.S. will hold Israel “accountable for any statements or actions that inflame tensions or prejudice the outcome of talks.”

JOSH RUEBNER
National advocacy director of the U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation, Ruebner said today: “Official written U.S. policy, which is based on the Fourth Geneva Convention, deems Israel’s colonization of Palestinian land as ‘inconsistent with international law.’ The Obama administration should translate its promise into action to hold Israel accountable for its ongoing violations of international law and its defiance of repeated U.S. calls to freeze all colonization of Palestinian land. The most effective way to do so would be to end U.S. military aid to Israel, amounting to $3 billion this year alone; [that would be] a real step towards a just and lasting peace between Palestinians and Israelis.”

The U.S. Campaign recently launched a new website — AidToIsrael.org — that documents “how U.S. military aid to Israel is being misused to injure and kill Palestinian civilians and to commit human rights abuses and violations of international law through Israel’s illegal 42-year military occupation of the Palestinian West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza Strip.” The website also documents “the budgetary trade-offs in terms of affordable housing, green jobs training, early reading education programs, and primary health care that could have been funded with this money instead.”

For more information, contact the Institute for Public Accuracy

Related:
Joint NGO report on child recruitment practices in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories

Jamal Juma, The Christian Science Monitor, 10 March 2010

The Palestinian elected leadership is weak. And even with Vice President Joe Biden’s visit to Israel, the West Bank and Jordan this week, the renewed Middle East peace process appears to be little more than a charade.

Israel has taken this opportunity to crack down on Palestinians who advocate nonviolent protests against the Israeli West Bank segregation barrier and charged them based on questionable or false evidence.

I know: I was arrested for talking too much. All we Palestinians want is a life free from racial discrimination.

[Read the report]

Related:
Mazin Qumsiyeh: Peaceful protest in Israel can lead to arrest

Conn Hallinan: The Crackdown on Israeli Dissidents

Israel’s Undermining of International Law
by Jeff Halper

The Israeli attack on Gaza in December 2008/January 2009 was not merely a military assault on a primarily civilian population, impoverished and the victim of occupation and besiegement these past 42 years. It was also part of an ongoing assault on international humanitarian law by a highly coordinated team of Israeli lawyers, military officers, PR people, and politicians, led by (no less) a philosopher of ethics. It is an effort coordinated as well with other governments whose political and military leaders are looking for ways to pursue “asymmetrical warfare” against peoples resisting domination and the plundering of their resources and labor without the encumbrances of human rights and current international law. It is a campaign that is making progress and had better be taken seriously by us all.

[Read the report]

Related:
Interview – Jeff Halper – The Global Pacification Industry

via Jewish Peace News

By Tobias Buck in Jerusalem and Daniel Dombey in Washington
Published: March 9 2010 22:22 | Last updated: March 10 2010 02:38

Israel on Tuesday revealed plans to build a further 1,600 housing units in a Jewish settlement in occupied East Jerusalem, a move Washington was quick to condemn for its impact on US-backed peace talks. The Israeli decision coincided with a visit by Joe Biden, the US vice-president and the country’s most senior official to travel to Israel since Barack Obama took office last year. It also came a day after the Palestinian Authority dropped opposition to a new round of indirect peace talks with Israel – a promise that may be in doubt.

“The substance and timing of the announcement … is precisely the kind of step that undermines the trust we need right now,” Mr Biden said in condemning Israel’s move. “We must build an atmosphere to support negotiations, not complicate them.”

[Read the report]

If Biden & co. are substantively upset and not so obviously playing a part then they’d take measures to register that displeasure, such as finally rescinding the tax-exempt status of land-grabbing front groups like, “American Friends of Ateret Cohanim, a nonprofit organization that sends millions of shekels worth of donations to Israel every year for clearly political purposes, such as buying Arab properties in East Jerusalem..” [“U.S. group invests tax-free millions in East Jerusalem land“, Uri Blau, Haaretz, 17 August 2009]

Related:
The Diane Rehm Show 1/11/2010
The IRS and Illegal Settlements

IRmep research director Grant F. Smith briefed IRS Commissioner Doug Shulman on National Public Radio about the US Treasury Department’s failure to regulate American charities laundering funds into illegal West Bank settlements.

via Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy