Israel’s Occupation Now Extended to Washington, DC

Tuesday, March 3rd, 5pm:   Protest War Criminal Netanyahu Israeli Consulate, 456 Montgomery St., San Francisco No to War Criminal Netanyahu! No New War on Iran! End the Colonial Occupation of Palestine! End U.S. Aid to Israel! Israeli prime minister and notorious war criminal Binyamin Netanyahu will be addressing a joint session of Congress on Tuesday, March 3. Netanyahu has presided over many massacres of Palestinians, the latest in Gaza last summer that killed more than 2,100 women, men and children, wounded more than 10,000, and left hundreds of thousands homeless.   The massive theft of and settlement on Palestinian land in the West Bank continues every day.   Much of this death, destruction and dispossession is paid for by our tax dollars, billions of which flow to Israel every year.

US’ NSA Gave Palestinian-American Family Ties to Israeli Military

NSA shared unedited data on Arab Americans’ calls with IDF intel unit

Ex-NSA contractor Snowden told author Bamford that data could enable Israel to target callers’ relatives in Israel and territories.

By Haaretz | Sep. 18, 2014

Ex-NSA contractor Edward Snowden told a U.S. author that the agency gave Israel unedited data about Arab Americans’ calls.

By Anshel Pfeffer | Sep. 15, 2014

The U.S. National Security Agency shared unredacted private communications from Americans – particularly Arab-Americans – with a key Israeli military-intelligence unit, an author and professor wrote.

In a New York Times op-ed piece, James Bamford said that he’d met this summer with Edward Snowden, the former NSA contractor who leaked thousands of classified documents.

Snowden found that the data NSA was passing to Israel’s Unit 8200 included IDs for who was calling whom.

Snowden said that the callers’ relatives in Israel and the territories could become targets based on the data, Bamford wrote in the Tuesday op-ed. When NSA shares information with other countries, it normally removes that identifying data, Bamford wrote.

Unit 8200 is the largest unit in the Israel Defense Forces and one of the military’s most prestigious divisions. It focuses on signals intelligence, or communications eavesdropping.

A week ago 43 former members of Unit 8200, including some officers, wrote an open letter to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and top military officials, saying they would refuse to do reserve service because of Israel’s `political persecution’ of the Palestinians.

When the smoke clears in Gaza

by Robin D. G. Kelley, August 8, 2014

http://blackeducator.blogspot.com/2014/08/gaza-massacre-continues-us-academia-and.html

“We know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians” –Nelson Mandela

Israel’s illegal, genocidal war on the people of Gaza has the characteristics of a massive tsunami.
Waged with even greater ferocity than Operation Cast Lead or any other assault since the Nakba of 1948 or the 1967 War, its destructive impact may even be worse. Masked as a war of “self-defense,” the euphemistically-named “Operation Protective Edge” is state violence at warp speed; it is completely indiscriminate yet calculated in its targeting of children and adult civilians, hospitals, schools, shelters, markets, and neighborhoods. So massive the onslaught, so swift the reports on social media, that my twitter feed resembles a ticker-tape machine. No one can write or speak fast enough to keep up with the body count.

As I write now, the Palestinian dead is inching toward the 2,000 mark, the injured close to 10,000; a quarter of Gaza’s population is displaced; about 10,000 homes were destroyed—including 141 schools; entire neighborhoods have been razed to the ground; morgues are filled to capacity as dead bodies lay strewn in streets, under rubble or placed in vegetable refrigerators or commercial ice cream freezers. The lack of electricity, clean water, food, sanitation, medical supplies, among other things, means a variety of infectious, nutritional and water-borne diseases are imminent.

If you are reading this, you’re probably familiar with these terrifying facts.

The Colonial Condescension of Those Who Ask for a “Palestinian Gandhi”

[The people of Gaza have, in their determined resistance, brought many issues to the fore among its supporters and defenders.  Central to these is the right of resistance itself — “by any means necessary” i.e., with whatever force the defenders can bring to the battlefield.  The forces of self-defense and the struggle for self-determination include moral force, political force, and military force.  Those who claim to support the victims of imperialist and settler-colonial military aggression, but argue against popular military resistance and armed liberation strategies, are denying the very means by which defense is made and by which liberation is won.  In the essay below, Ramzy Baroud of Palestine Chronicle details the background and recent history and “debate” over this issue.  (And, an important, but here secondary, difference with Baroud’s concluding paragraphs which cite ‘Gandhi’s inspiring greatness in the struggle against colonialism’ — this is disputed in India and elsewhere, as, most recently, Arundhati Roy and many others have challenged the iconization of Gandhi as a false anti-colonialist who ushered in an “independent” India without breaking the colonialist cultures and structures and laws of caste, class, and repressive state violence, and without empowering the people who, in their overwhelming majority, live today in the same same oppressive conditions that characterized the period of direct British colonial rule.  But this is a side-point here, which will be further explored separately and soon). — Frontlines ed.]

Gaza’s resistance paradigm
By Ramzy Baroud, Palestine Chronicle

“Where is the Palestinian Gandhi? In Israeli prison, of course!,” was the title of an article by Jo Ehrlich published in Mondoweiss.net on December 21, 2009. That was almost exactly one year after Israel’s concluded a major war against Gaza. The so-called Operation Cast Lead (December 27, 2008 – January 18, 2009) was, till then, the deadliest Israeli attack against the impoverished strip for many years.

Ehrlich was not in the least being belittling by raising the question about the “Palestinian Gandhi” but responding to the patronization of others. Right from the onset, he remarked: “Not that I’m in any way playing into the Palestinian Gandhi dialogue, I think it’s actually pretty diversionary/racist. But sometimes you have to laugh in order not to cry.”

Indeed, the question was and remains condescending, ignorant, patronizing and utterly racist. But the question was also pervasive, including among people who classify themselves as “pro-Palestinian activists”.

Now that Israel’s latest war – so-called Operation Protective Edge – has surpassed Cast Lead in terms of duration, causalities, level of destruction, but also the targeting of civilians – the Gandhi question seems more muted than usual. To understand why, one needs to first examine the reason of why Palestinians were demanded to produce a non-violent Gandhi alternative in their struggle for freedom in the first place.

Zionism is shameless and proud of settler colonial conquests and racist expulsions of Palestinians

[Once again, every act of the violent settler colonial state of Israel clarifies the fact that Palestinian liberation will not come by submission, surrender, collaboration, or dinner parties. — Frontlines ed.]

Netanyahu to Europe leaders: no apology over settlements

The Israeli prime minister has remained defiant over controversial settlement plans during a visit to Europe, as Israel presses ahead with proposals to build in one of the most sensitive areas of the occupied West Bank.

In Prague small numbers of demonstrators turned out both for and against the Israeli cause.

Benjamin Netanyahu had come to thank the Czech Republic for voting against the Palestinians’ diplomatic upgrade to non-member observer status at the United Nations.

He praised his hosts for opposing what he called a “one-sided” resolution. Israel would not sacrifice its “vital interests for the sake of obtaining the world’s applause”.

Israeli military and settlers interrupt olive harvest celebration in Hebron

by Badia Dwaik, mondoweiss.net

October 24, 2011

The event was held in the land surrounding the Al- Sumood Centre on the beautiful hill overlooking the city. The coordinator of the youth movement and member of the council of students Murad Amro, invited the collection of students, who arrived in their droves, donning Palestinian state scarves and optimistic excitement.Youth Against Settlements (YAS) are a grassroots organisation who’s main objective is to engage the community in non-violent resistance, actions and to support and protect the local community and families against the abuse and provocations they endure daily from the settlers and Israeli Occupation Force (IOF), who are illegally residing in the centre of the city. YAS involve the locals in many community events, from teaching international languages, training in media to life skills and protests, one of which involved changing the name of Shuhada to Apartheid Street.

Olive harvesting is an ancient tradition and one which not only benefits Palestinians through stimulating local economy and supporting families in their steadfastness, but furthermore since the occupation of the country, it has political value. Since 2000, 1.3 million olive trees have been burnt, cut down and destroyed, so therefore it is of upmost importance for locals and internationals to support the families and to protect their land from such attacks.

Israeli Foreign Minister Wants to Strip Palestinians in Israel of Citizenship and Expel Them

[While Lieberman’s position has not been adopted by the Israeli ruling class as a whole, just the fact that he has been given a platform for his overtly Zionist-racist views is indicative of where the Israeli government is doing on the ground: gradual ethnic cleansing of Israel and the West Bank of the Palestinian people.-ed]

 

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (R) and Israeli Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs of Israel Avigdor Lieberman arrive for a joint press conference at the U.S. State Department June 17, 2009 in Washington, DC.

Israeli Foreign Minister Wants Palestinians Stripped Of
Citizenship And Relocated

By Jonathan Cook

27 June, 2010,  The National

NAZARETH: Avigdor Lieberman, Israel’s far-right foreign minister, set out this week what he called a “blueprint for a resolution to the conflict” with the Palestinians that demands most of the country’s large Palestinian minority be stripped of citizenship and relocated outside Israel’s future borders.

Mr Lieberman said that Israel faced growing diplomatic pressure for a full withdrawal to the Green Line, the pre-1967 border, and if such a partition were implemented, “the conflict will inevitably pass beyond those borders and into Israel”.

He accused many of Israel’s 1.3 million Palestinian citizens of acting against Israel while their leaders “actively assist those who want to destroy the Jewish state”.

Israel’s Ethnic Cleansing of Palestinian Bedouins

Bedouin family in Negev region of southern Israel/Palestine.

Ethnic Cleansing Inside The Green Line

By Nora Barrows-Friedman & Rawia Abu Rabia

26 May, 2010,  The Electronic Intifada

Al-Masadiya, al-Garin, Khirbat al-Watan, Bir al-Hamam, Khashem Zana, Sawin, al-Shahabi, Wadi al-Naam and al-Mashash are all Palestinian Bedouin villages facing destruction by bulldozers and cement mixers as Israel’s transportation ministry plans to lengthen its Trans-Israel Highway southward into the Naqab (Negev) desert. This means that more than 3,000 Palestinian Bedouins could be displaced if an injunction filed by Israeli civil rights nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) doesn’t succeed in the high court.

Spokespeople for Bimkom (Planners for Planning Rights), the Association for Civil Rights in Israel and the Regional Council for Unrecognized Villages in the Negev, some of the groups filing the injunction, say that the Israeli government approved the highway construction without consideration for indigenous populations in the Naqab.

The Israeli daily Haaretz reports that the highway extension is part of the Israeli government’s plan for “development” of the Naqab, which also includes the construction of a massive Israeli military training facility at the Southern end.