This week’s postings@JfJfP.com


May 21, 2017
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“The policemen … could have overcome Hajiji and detained her without resorting to shooting, and certainly not lethal shooting. Instead they shot and killed a 16-year-old girl who wasn’t endangering them,” according to B’Tselem. Fatima Hajiji, 16, who was shot at least 10 times in East Jerusalem while brandishing a knife, wanted to be a martyr. Witnesses say she wasn’t endangering anyone. Gideon Levy and Alex Levac report:
A Palestinian Girl’s Suicide by Israeli Cop

Around 1,000 Palestinians held in Israeli prisons have entered their second month of a hunger strike over conditions and medical rights. Their demands include better and consistent access to healthcare; more liberal family visit policies; and an end to solitary confinement and administrative detention.
Added to them now are demands for proper access to adequate medical treatment for those on hunger strike. Palestinian and Israeli human rights organisations – Addameer, Adalah, the Arab Association for Human Rights and Physicians for Human Rights-Israel – issued a joint statment last week urging Israel to “cease its ongoing, systematic human rights violations against the hunger-strikers”.
Palestinian hunger Strikers – an update

Al-Shabaka, the Palestinian Policy Network, chose to mark Nakba Day by publishing a compilation of recent articles, looking at the unique difficulties of Palestinian refugees displaced across the Middle East – from becoming refugees a second or third time due to the ongoing Syrian civil war to over-researching camps “famous” for tragedy while under-researching other refugee situations and exile communities.
The Palestinian Refugees – 69 years and counting…

Deputy Knesset Speaker Betzalel Smotrich recently talked to a gathering of religious Zionist public figures about his diplomatic plan “to erase all Palestinian national hope”, to reduce Palestinians in Israel to – at best – “resident aliens”. Academic Thomas Persico fears he is tapping into deep, biblically-justified, religious-mythic urges and that in a contest between democracy and ethnonationalism, it will be difficult for the former to win out.
The “subjugation plan”

At the very last minute, Israeli lobbying succeeded in persuading FIFA to break its own rules and delay tabling a report that would ban settlement football teams from representing themselves as Israeli and playing in the Israeli League. The Palestine Football Association reacted furiously, condemning FIFA’s actions at the Congress and indicating it will approach the Court for Arbitration of Sport to resolve its problems.
Red Card for Israeli Football delayed yet again

Guardian reporter Sara Helms deplores the fact that the west is only too happy to leave the people of Gaza inside their prison. Hamas’s election of a new leader in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, as well as its new policy document provides an opening for a new initiative – but the British government shows no sign of being willing or able to think outside its self-imposed box.
We need to talk to Hamas

Mondoweiss reports, following Haaretz, that the Israeli government is considering a bill to stop civil rights organisations from representing Palestinians in petitions to the High Court of Justice. Another step forward for “the only democracy in the Middle East”…
NGOs to be banned from taking High Court actions on behalf of Palestinians?

From this month African asylum seekers, motsly from Eritrea or Sudan, who work in Israel are having part of their wage income forcibly deducted by the state and placed into an account to which they have no access. It will only be returned to them when they go home….
Israeli bank, Mizrahi Tefahot, has already informed its investors that the policy will improve its liquidity and reserve ratio, because the money isn’t accessible to its owners, and the bank can use it to offset loans.
Government adds to woes of asylum seekers in israel

A group of British Jews currently living in Jerusalem initiated an open letter to a former UK Chief Rabbi. The group expresses concern that Israeli Jewish celebrations of the unification of Jerusalem in which Rabbi Lord Sacks is set to participate airbrush out the realities of the 50-year old Occupation. The letter also describes the hateful behaviour and violence – towards Palestinians living in the Old City – which Yom Yerushalayim provokes each year.
Rabbi Lord Sacks: please think again

This article is Haaretz’s lead editorial, published in both the Hebrew and English newspapers in Israel. It is a biting critique of the Hebrew University’s capitulation to those working to place opposition to the occupation, or even discussion of it, beyond the pale. A situation has developed where it is enough to send a letter of protest or write a post on Facebook to make events discussing the occupation disappear. We in Britain are becoming familiar with a similar alarming trend…
Hebrew University capitulates to right-wing pressure

Controversial columnist Yossi Klein, condemned last month by both Netanyahu and Lieberman for a previous op-ed, has produced a new hard-hitting provocation. “The Holocaust was unique, terrible and happened only once, but not the processes that preceded it. They were so ordinary that their language of imagery fits into our language. The language of processes is always shallow; the images repeat themselves. There’s no need to be original, it’s all been said before. Long before Culture and Sports Minister Miri Regev, people referred to refugees as “a cancer” and talked about “domestic enemies” who “stab us in the back.” Whoever declares “One Bible, One Nation, One Homeland!” doesn’t know, or probably doesn’t care, that it’s a paraphrase of “Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Führer!” (“One People, One Empire, One Leader!”).”
My Lesson from the Holocaust

The occupation has gone on for 50 years. NIF, the New Israel Fund, has produced a series of memorable dates and stories as part of its effort to teach the history of the occupation so we can overcome it. Here it tells about the floating Israeli peacenik pirate radio station, launched on 19 May 1973.
Peacenik pirate radio, 1973

In this Guardian Long Read Nathan Thrall tackles the myth of two willing sides wanting peace – with extremists somehow hijacking the agenda. The truth is that Israel is pretty happy with the current situation and has no real desire for peace. Until the US and Europe formulate a strategy to make Israel’s circumstances less desirable than the concessions it would make in a peace agreement, they will shoulder responsibility for the oppressive military regime they continue to preserve and fund…
Why the peace talks always fail…

Simone Susskind, long time Belgian peace activist and one time President of the Centre communautaire laïc juif (Secular Jewish Community Asociation) writes about the “Two States, One Homeland” initiative, an attempt to develop a third way that deals with the limitations of the two states approach, without disowning it.
“Two states One homeland”

Two articles from the Jewish Chronicle, suggesting that Israel’s honeymoon with Donald Trump is over. Apparently, Israel is worried about Trump’s causal sharing of confidential information with the Russians – information sourced by Israel’s security services. And it is peeved at Trump rowing back on his campaign promise to “transfer the US embassy to the eternal capital of the Jewish people, Jerusalem”.
Israel’s love affair with Trump is turning sour

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