Antony Loewenstein

The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights release a statement:

The Palestinian Center for Human Rights (PCHR) strongly condemns the Israeli government’s decision to allow Jewish settler groups to enter the yards of the al-Aqsa Mosque in occupied East Jerusalem.  PCHR further condemns the use of excessive force by Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) against Palestinian civilians who attempted to prevent the provocative entry of settlers into the Mosque.  PCHR reminds of similar incidents that took place 9 years ago when the former Israeli Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, entered the yards of the al-Aqsa Mosque. This incident sparked the outbreak of the al-Aqsa Mosque, in which thousands of Palestinian civilians have been killed or wounded.  PCHR calls upon the international community to immediately intervene and pressurize Israeli occupation authorities to stop all settlement activities in occupied Jerusalem.

According to investigations conducted by PCHR, at approximately 07:30 on Sunday, 27 September 2009, at least 40 Israeli settlers, escorted by Israeli Police and Border Guards, attempted to break into the yards of al-Aqsa Mosque through the al-Maghariba Gate.  A number of Palestinian civilians who were present in the mosque were able to prevent the settlers from entering.  Soon after, the Israeli police and border guards violently broke into the yards of the Mosque firing rubber-coated metal bullets, tear gas canisters and sound bombs at Palestinian civilians.  They also violently beat a number of civilians.  As a result, 3 Palestinian civilians were wounded by rubber-coated metal bullets.

During my recent visit to Israel and the West Bank I spent time with the wonderful Israeli group Ta’ayush as they protected Palestinian farmers from violent Jewish settlers and complicit IDF soldiers.

Here’s a story, via Ta’ayush member Joseph Dana:

September 22, 2009. Jerusalem District Court. Amiel and Eli

It’s become a little too familiar, the Jerusalem Magistrates Court. I’ve been here several times in recent months because of Ezra Nawi’s ongoing trial; and today I’m here because Amiel and Eli have been charged with disorderly behavior and (in Eli’s case) hindering a policeman in carrying out his duty. Originally, the police wanted to charge them with “endangering human life on a public road”—a serious offense carrying a penalty of up to twenty years in jail, put on the books in order to punish Palestinian stone-throwers during the first Intifada—but the prosecution eventually decided on less severe charges.

Here’s what happened. On October 8, 2006 Ta’ayush organized a demonstration march near the Al-Khadr check-point, south of Jerusalem, to protest against the slow starvation of the Palestinian population caught between the Security Barrier and Highway 60, the main north-south highway in the southern West Bank. Since the Security Barrier has been built deep inside Palestinian territory, far to the east of the highway, and since the whole of the territory between the Barrier and the highway is clearly slated for Israeli annexation, the Palestinian farmers, shepherds, and viniculturists still living there, a population of perhaps 20,000, are trapped: they no longer have access to medical clinics, offices, schools, and, above all, to their traditional markets. Lots of grapes are grown in this enclave; once they were marketed in Gaza, Jerusalem, Israel, Jordan, and the northern West Bank; now, because of the Barrier and the army roadblocks, and because grapes have a very short shelf-life after picking, they mostly rot on the vine or in storage. Al-Khadr itself is east of the Barrier, cut off from its own vineyards to the west of it which produce 11,000 tons of grapes each year. Amiel’s idea was to march along the highway with large cartons of grapes, to distribute them (together with an explanatory flyer) to passing drivers and, when the police arrived and tried to put an end to this subversive effort, to dump the grapes on the ground in protest—also to make sure that the media, local and international, captured this moment on film. A similar tactic has been used quite effectively in public protests by French farmers and just might work, whatever “working” means, in Palestine as well.

A recent history of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas told in photographs.

(Courtesy of the effective compilation skills of Tony Karon.)

The often perceptive Shraga Elam:

It is noteworthy that notwithstanding the real aims of Iran’s policy, they certainly help Israel to remove the Palestinian issue from the international agenda…Thus the Iranian leadership has once harmed again Palestinian interests.

On the other hand Iran’s rulers now have an opportunity to make several important demands in return for abandoning their nuclear ambitions. They may thereby achieve important objectives not only for their own country, but also for the Palestinians.

Al-Jazeera English ran a documentary series in June about Israel’s far-right parties, groups indulged by the Jewish state:

As the boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign against Israel gathers pace, the inevitable Zionist backlash is growing.

Here’s the Forward editorial this week:

Time was when a boycott demanded personal sacrifice as an expression of protest. That’s how the name first was coined, when Irish tenant farmers and tradesmen in the late-19th century refused to deal with the agent of an absentee landlord named Charles Boycott. And that’s how it has continued in the popular imagination: blacks in Montgomery, Ala., walking miles and miles to avoid the segregated city buses; consumers forgoing lettuce and grapes in solidarity with ill-treated farm workers.

The boycotted faced economic consequences, and so did the boycotter, sacrificing something important in service of a higher goal.

But the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel will have none of that. Despite its well-honed and increasingly effective rhetoric, its adherents seem uninterested in performing any personal sacrifice, or even measuring their “success” by hard numbers. They are most intent on sullying Israel’s name and bullying anyone who might suggest another path toward peace in the troubled region.

And Bradley Burston in Haaretz:

To the BDS people and their spiritual kin in Toronto, let me say just this: When you criticize Israel, for God’s sake – if only for the Palestinians’ sake – tell the truth. The whole truth. Not just your carefully composed cardboard cutout, the cartoon of the Jewish villain and the Arab martyr. And not from a distance.

Come here. Do the work. Take the risks. Put your slogans and your posters and your buttons and signs and t-shirts and open letters to the test. Put your life where your sloganeering is.

You despise Israel, we get that. You dismiss the capacity of Israelis for good faith and humanism. We get that too. But if you talk struggle in Toronto and San Francisco and Irvine, it’s no more than talk, and wasted breath at that. You can boycott away, all you like. In the end, you’re only drumming up more business for Israel.

If only such passionate words were used to try and end the occupation, rather than simply attacking those using non-violent tactics to do so. Peace won’t suddenly appear by hoping for the Obama administration or the Israeli people. The latter have had decades and the results speak for themselves.

Iranian Ibrahim Sharifi protested during the recent post-election uprising. His story, told here in yesterday’s New York Times, is devastating:

Mr. Sharifi was one of five brothers raised in north Tehran in a middle class family that was religious but not fanatically so. His father, a retired military officer, was a supporter of the 1979 revolution and participated in the rallies against the shah. His mother wore the traditional head-to-toe chador.

At Open University in Tehran, Mr. Sharifi studied computer engineering, and Italian at the Italian Consulate, the latter in hopes of studying medicine in Italy.

Not overtly political, he said he wanted more democracy and freedom, but gradually and peacefully. “I always told my father that even the 1979 revolution was a mistake, and that my generation did not want one,” he said.

He says everyone in his family favored the reform movement and were shocked when Mr. Ahmadinejad announced that he had won in a landslide victory, an outcome that has been denounced as a fraud.

Mr. Sharifi was outraged, and the only one in his family who began participating in rallies every day. He was on his way back home the afternoon of June 22 when he was grabbed by two men. “I had taken part in every single protest, so I saw this coming,” he said.

He said he was handcuffed, blindfolded and, as he later learned, taken to the notorious Kahrizak detention center in southwestern Tehran, where even the government concedes that several detainees were killed.

He said he remained handcuffed and blindfolded for four days in a cramped cell with about 30 other prisoners.

They were beaten senseless the first day, he said, and periodically after that over the next four days. Urine and blood covered the floor.

By the fourth day he was beginning to lose hope of getting out alive. He had trouble closing his mouth and he said he began vomiting blood.

“I told the guard that he should go ahead and just kill me if he wanted to,” he said, breaking into tears. “Then he called another guard and said ‘Take this bastard and impregnate him.’ ”

They took him out of the cell to another room where they pushed him against a wall that had handcuffs and two metal hooks to keep his legs open. The guard pulled down his underwear, he said, and began raping him.

“He laughed mockingly as he was doing it and said that I could not even defend myself so how did I think that I could stage a revolution.

“They wanted to horrify and intimidate me,” he said, weeping.

At that point, Mr. Sharifi said, he passed out. The next thing he remembered was opening his eyes and realizing he was in a hospital with one hand cuffed to his bed. Another young man was screaming hysterically on a bed next to him.

He said he heard a doctor tell someone, “Dump him or you’ll have the same problem as the other ones,” meaning that he would die in custody. Two days later, he said, they put him in a car, took him to a highway in Tehran and left him there, blindfolded.

This is how Israel and the Western-backed Palestinian Authority do business (the latter having virtually no power as the compliant partner):

Tensions are mounting between Israel and the Palestinian Authority following Ramallah’s call on the International Court at The Hague to examine claims of “war crimes” that the IDF allegedly committed during Operation Cast Lead in the Gaza Strip. The issue is already weighing in on the relations between the leadership of Israel’s defense and security establishment with their counterparts in the West Bank, and is part of a growing list of Israeli complaints about the behavior of PA officials.

Meanwhile, Israel has warned the Palestinian Authority that it would condition permission for a second cellular telephone provider to operate in the West Bank – an economic issue of critical importance to the PA leadership – on the Palestinians withdrawing their request at the International Court.

If only more leaders in the Middle East adopted this dignified silence:

Following the publication here in early September of a new SBS news directive that told journalists not to use the term “Palestinian land” to, er, describe Palestinian land, today’s Australian newspaper has some responses:

Tzvi Fleischer, editor of Australia/Israel Review, which is put out by the Australia/Israel and Jewish Affairs Council, backed SBS’s position.

“It’s sensible where we have a dispute about territory that reports should reflect there’s a dispute and use language that makes that clear without adjudicating that one side or the other is in the right,” he said.

But Jake Lynch, director of Sydney University’s Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies, said the ruling showed “a lamentable ignorance of the facts and … should be rescinded forthwith”.

“No reputable expert in international law, international relations or my own field of peace and conflict studies would dispute that the land in question is Palestinian,” he said.

“One of the main points of this story is that the occupied territories of East Jerusalem and the West Bank are Palestinian, and SBS journalists must be allowed to explain that, or viewers and listeners risk being misled and confused.”

Professor Lynch said the BBC Board of Governors had reached the opposite conclusion to SBS when considering the question in 2004 after a complainant objected to references in its broadcasts to “Palestinian land” and “Arab land”. The BBC said in its ruling that “these terms appropriately reflected the language of UN resolutions”.

Professor Lynch and lobby group Australians for Palestine have complained to SBS about the ombudsman’s ruling.

An SBS spokeswoman said no one would comment further.

“SBS does not make public comments on internal editorial decisions which are made from time to time for a variety of reasons,” she said.

Jerusalem Reality Tours, necessary on the ground examination of the increasingly fragmented holy city, does not offer this:

Fictional images and facts of Jerusalem.

Just another day in the West Bank through the eyes of fundamentalist Jewish settlers.