Palestinian/Israeli update 10/27\2015.. wrong Palestinian, wrong place

Violence Continues in Israel Despite Deal

Relentless Violence In Occupied West Bank

Moment IDF disperses Palestinian protesters in West Bank using tear gas

What is motivating young East Jerusalem Palestinians to carry out attacks on Israelis?

Stun grenades and tear scatter Palestinian protesters

Abbas condemns killing of Palestinians by Israelis

Israel Strikes Gaza In Response To Rocket Fire

‘IDF guilt presumption: wrong Palestinian, wrong place’

Israeli forces shoot dead Palestinian youth during protest in village near al-Khalil

SHOCKING NEW FOOTAGE: Palestinian TV incites Arabs to murder Jews

Israel’s Descent Into Unmasked, Right Wing Extremism

This Palestinian resistance is a spontaneous reaction to the most racist, far-right government in Israel’s history

By Omar Barghouti

October 26, 2015 “Information Clearing House” – “Salon” – As I write these words, a new unflinching generation of Palestinians is rising up against Israel’s decades-old regime of occupation, settler-colonialism and apartheid.

I usually succeed in shutting out the bloody images and the haunting stories of our children being brutalized by Israel’s occupying army so that I can focus on contributing my fair share to the emancipation of my people, without being emotionally overwhelmed, drained, and disempowered. But at a certain point you cannot help but reach a level of heavy heartedness. So I am not in a mood to write diplomatically today.

This phase of popular Palestinian resistance has broken out spontaneously, in reaction to exceptionally repressive policies of the most racist, settler-dominated and far-right government in Israel’s history.

Since Benjamin Netanyahu’s return to power in 2009, Israel’s descent into unmasked, right wing extremism has accelerated alarmingly. The number of Jewish settlers living illegally on occupied Palestinian land has grown by more than 120,000, something Netanyahu was recently caught on tape boasting about. Meanwhile, a steady stream of discriminatory, anti-democratic laws targeting Palestinian citizens of Israel, and to a lesser extent Jewish-Israeli critics of Israel’s apartheid regime, have been passed by the Israeli parliament. These include the so-called “boycott law,” and the “Nakba law.”

Following a recent visit to occupied Palestine, South African Parliamentary Speaker Baleka Mbete wrote, “Apartheid in South Africa was a picnic compared to what we have seen in the occupied territories.” Not just in the occupied territories, actually.

The ongoing Israeli “state terrorism” against Palestinians all over historic Palestine, the violent attacks and desecration campaigns by fanatic Jewish fundamentalists against Palestinian civilians, including burning a toddler and his parents alive, and the systematic desecration of our Christian and Muslim places of prayer, particularly the Al-Aqsa (Noble Sanctuary) mosque compound, were the direct trigger for the current Palestinian uprising, dubbed “The Jerusalem Intifada” by several political parties and youth groups.

For more than a decade, the fanatical messianic “Temple Mount movement” has been growing inside Israel, with the ultimate goal of destroying the Muslim shrines on the Noble Sanctuary and replacing them with a temple, something they declare openly.

Once on the fringes of Israeli society, today this dangerous fundamentalist movement has moved into the mainstream, counting senior government officials among its adherents. The Israeli government in fact provides direct financial and political support to extremist settler groups, like the Temple Institute and others, that are colonizing Palestinian homes and neighborhoods in Jerusalem and actively working towards building a temple in place of the Al-Aqsa mosque, putting paid to hollow, disingenuous claims by Netanyahu that Palestinians have no reason to fear an Israeli desire to change the status quo on the site.

The seemingly random but persistent Israeli violent attacks against Palestinians are in fact part of an official Israeli strategy whose goal is to intensify the ethnic cleansing and “Judaization” of occupied East Jerusalem, especially its Old City and, and to eventually take over the Noble Sanctuary. This was done with the historic Ibrahimi mosque in Hebron following the 1994 massacre of 29 Palestinian worshippers by an Israeli-American terrorist. Following the massacre, Israel’s occupation authorities partitioned the mosque and gave half of it to Hebron’s notoriously far-right and violent settler population for exclusive Jewish use, effectively rewarding them for the murderous acts of the killer who came from their midst and egging them on to pursue their criminal attacks on Palestinians with impunity…………

Confessions of an Israeli traitor

I was an Israel Defense Forces soldier in Gaza 27 years ago, during the first intifada. We patrolled the city and the villages and the refugee camps and encountered angry teenagers throwing stones at us. We responded with tear gas and rubber bullets.

Now those seem like the good old days.

Since then, the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians has seen stones replaced with guns and suicide bombs, then rockets and highly trained militias, and now, in the past month, kitchen knives, screwdrivers and other improvised weapons. Some of these low-tech efforts have been horrifically successful, with victims as young as 13. There is plenty to discuss about the nature and timing of the recent wave of Palestinian attacks — a desperate and humiliated answer to the election of a hostile Israeli government that emboldens extremist settlers to attack Palestinians. But as an Israeli, I am more concerned with the actions of my own society, which are getting scarier and uglier by the moment.

The internal discussion in Israel is more militant, threatening and intolerant than it has ever been. Talk has trended toward fundamentalism ever since the Israeli operation in Gaza in late 2008, but it has recently gone from bad to worse. There seems to be only one acceptable voice, orchestrated by the government and its spokespeople, and beamed to all corners of the country by a clan of loyal media outlets drowning out all the others. Those few dissenters who attempt to contradict it — to ask questions, to protest, to represent a different color from this artificial consensus — are ridiculed and patronized at best, threatened, vilified and physically attacked at worst. Israelis not “supporting our troops” are seen as traitors, and newspapers asking questions about the government’s policies and actions are seen as demoralizing.

Since the start of last year’s Gaza war, there have been several incidents of anti-leftist violence to go along with the attacks aimed at Palestinians: Left-wing protesters were assaulted at antiwar demonstrations in Tel Aviv and Haifa last summer, during the war; left-wing journalist Gideon Levy of Haaretz was accused of treason by a Knesset member, a crime that during wartime is punishable by death. He’s since hired bodyguards. The comedian Orna Banai lost an advertising job after an interview in which she expressed horror over Israeli actions against Palestinians. This month, people in Afula attacked an Arab correspondent for an Israeli TV network and his Jewish crew while they reported on a stabbing attack. A new bill in the Knesset encourages the thought police by turning away visitors to Israel who have supported the movement to boycott companies profiting from the occupation. On Friday, a masked Jewish settler attacked the president of leftist group Rabbis for Human Rights in a Palestinian olive grove in the West Bank. On social media, the gloves are taken off, social courtesies abandoned, hatred rears its ugly head. Facebook pages calling for violence against left-wingers and Arabs appear frequently, and even when they’re taken down, they pop up again in one guise or another. Any sentiment not aligned with the supposed consensus is met with a barrage of racist vitriol. One Facebook group calling itself the Shadow Lions discussed how to disrupt a wedding between an Arab and a Jew, posting the groom’s phone number and urging people to call and harass him. On Twitter and Instagram, hashtags like #leftiesout and #traitorlefties abound. Film director Shira Geffen, who asked her movie audiences for a moment of silence to respect Palestinian children killed in an Israeli offensive, was flayed across Israeli social networks. “Shame,” a new and brilliant play by actress Einat Weitzman, brings to the stage a selection of the hateful comments she received after wearing a T-shirt bearing the Palestinian flag. One example from the play: “If the baby that was murdered was yours I wonder which flag you would put on yourself. Now step on it and get your ugly head back to your tiny apartment and bury yourself from the shame until you die there alone and maybe in your funeral we will ask the Jihad to read verses from the Koran………….

The tide is turning against Zionist extremism

…… But it is increasingly clear that the occupation has never been about security — if it were, Israel could legally have maintained a military occupation without moving a single settler into the occupied territories. Now, with the majority of Israeli political elites openly declaring their desire to annex most of the West Bank and prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state under any circumstances, the security argument for maintaining the occupation no longer holds much water…..