This week's postings at JfJfP.com


May 31, 2015
Sarah Benton

Two international stories in which Israel / Palestine play a major, but often overlooked part, head this week’s postings this week, May 25th-31st 2015.

The first is the profoundly important issue of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), a secretive deal between the USA and EU which threatens Europe’s regulations on labour and safety but, after an amendment, also any European body which condones, has dealings or actually engages in advocating boycotting Israeli goods, whether or not from illegal settlements.
The trade treaty that threatens democracy and the right to boycott

Boycotting bodies that boycott settlements

The second is the bathetic/ hopeful end (a handshake, and withdrawal of the resolution) to the PFA’s attempt to get the Israel Football Association suspended from FIFA because of transgressions against FIFA’s code. It’s a story of two halves  – or perhaps three thirds:
Palestine at FIFA, Update 2

The most damning report on Israel for some time came from the UN’s Special Envoy for children and armed conflict: she included Israel in a list of states which harm children. At least 495 Palestinian children were killed in Gaza and 3,374 wounded (imagine those figures in a European country). Ban Ki Moon is trying to row back from the blacklisting; Israel says including them is just an act of Israel-hatred.
Israel is a state that harms children

That hideous war continues with other repercussions as a variety of bodies struggle to make sense of it and hold both Israeli and Palestinian bodies to account for the toll of destruction.

Amnesty released two reports: the one detailing heinous crimes of torture and executions ordered by Hamas received mass coverage; the report on war crimes, (following one on Israeli war crimes) much less.
Hamas crimes committed in the time of war

An angry but clear response comes from two Palestinian academics to the widespead and sympathic coverage given to the reports of the Breaking the Silence testimonials provided by IDF soldiers about OPE. They say not only did Palestinians know all this already, but their testimony was not ‘elite’ or ‘privileged’. BtS testimony is known as
‘Shooting and crying’

Have you heard of ‘Canary Mission’? They’re a secretive American group which thinks publicity on a website for all pro-Palestinians (mainly Americans) is necessary for the safety of the realm /employers in  the USA. For ‘communist’ in the 1950s read pro-Palestinian today. What was that about freedom of speech?
Secretive group posts details of pro-Palestinian individuals

A harsh, but legally fantastical law, enforced by the Israeli state – dating from before it vanquished Jerusalem – is the Absentee Property Law. This, in Israeli law, entitles the Israeli state to claim all Palestinian properties which were not inhabited by people with deeds to ownership on the day the Israeli was acknowledged by the UN. Think of how many would have failed to meet these criteria in that day in those scary times. Result – Palestinians who have lived in their Jerusalem homes for generations are evicted for failing to meet these criteria, their familial homes claimed by Jewish settler groups. Where’s the international outrage?
Eviction of families who, under Israeli law, are not there

If we were concerned about the safety of the realm, it’s not the Palestinians we’d worry about, it’s the home-bred young Israeli nationalists who do not (yet) assert themselves through a political party because they prefer the flamboyant and belligerent demonstration of ‘Jerusalem Day’ – a triumphalist celebration of the military capture of Jerusalem in 1967 and the loss of its ‘corpus separatum’ (separate body) status determined by the 1947 UN Partition Plan. Muslim shop owners close the shutters  for the day.
Jerusalem’s festival of young male bullies
The 2015 election result means nothing will be done to quell their provocative marches:
Likud win brings ultra-Orthodox and pro-settler dominance
To which Uri Avnery says
God save Israel – Israelis won’t.

But some Israelis continue with the unrewarded work of demytholigising the Zionist myth (into which most western countries have bought).  Palestinian residents of Haifa, who (rationally) fled in fear, did not want to return. Nonsense, according to a new letter found from Ben Gurion (and lied about by Golda Meir). They were prevented by the IDF from returning to their homes and possessions, so joining the ranks of the dispossessed refugees. Again, Palestinians knew this; it seems to take an Israeli source to make it believable.
Another blow to Zionist myth

Palestinian news agencies, which should tell the other story, are woefully under-resourced. Palestinian journalists who do what they can are subject to frequent harassment by Israel agencies (freedom of speech?) and women journalists, of whom they are many, have a particularly hard time. They face the same restrictions as their male colleagues – but in addition face disgusting threats of arrest, rape and sexual harassment – delivered by both Israeli security forces and social media. For what it’s worth, we send our solidarity. Can we help?
Hard lines for Palestinian women journalists

And more besides

Note: Photo of olives grown at and sold from the illegal settlement of Shiloh by Moti Milrod.

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