This week’s postings@JfJfP.com, 07.01.18
This is the last edition of the weekly summaries from the postings department. From now on the material we have posted for JfJfP will either be posted in different sections of the website, or will not be posted – mainly reposted except for the Signatories’ blogs – at all.
Since the website was started, over a decade ago, media coverage of the Palestine/Israel conflict has increased enormously. A number of British newspapers – most of them freely available online – now give the politics of the conflict regular coverage. The Guardian, Independent, Telegraph, Mail online and Financial Times all have correspondents in the region who file good copy. Broadcast media, though always contested in their impartiality, also now provide both news stories but, more importantly, special programmes and series on the conflict (if more on Israel than Palestine).
A subscription is needed for the FT and for Haaretz premium articles.
In addition, there has been the exponential increase in internet posting by groups and NGOs with a special interest in the conflict, the Occupation and its consequences.
So in our last appearance, here is the summary for the week January 1st-7th, 2018.
Ahed Tamimi, age 16, has dominated Israeli and Palestinian coverage for reasons that the various commentators explain. First off Mondoweiss, the BBC and the Free Ahed Tamimi petition (now with 306,260 signatures). Arresting her is widely seen as an:
Most interestingly, many see her as the new face of Palestinian Resistance, not just because she is so telegenic but also because she is young, female and not a member of either Fatah or Hamas. She is ‘A Symbol of Palestinian Resistance for the Internet Age’:
Changing the face of Palestine
And in a mark of her effect in changing the narrative, CNN and (conservative) JPost look at the ‘making of an icon’ of Palestinian resistance:
Another young Palestinian woman, the poet Dareen Tatour, has also been arrested and charged with incitement (and supporting ‘terrorists’) by Israeli authorities. The estimable +972 declared this their most important coverage in 2017:
Israeli politicians regard their fight against critics, especially BDS, as necessary self-defence. Gilad Erdan, minister of public security and strategic affairs, has produced a blacklist of the 20 organisations whose members are banned. As most of them probably don’t want to go to Israel it’s another of that ministry’s un-strategic, speciously powerful, moves:
In Tikun Olam, Richard Silverstein presents this as the public security ministry slipping into a state security role, the Third Eye. He documents the $millions raised for fighting the BDS movement from right-wing American Jewish billionaires:
Israel’s slush fund for exterminating BDS
It’s not possible to separate Israeli citizens from these governmental decisions, however oppressive. The Knesset has voted for a
New law to keep E.Jerusalem forever Israeli
And a high policy committee in Likud, the largest Israeli party, has voted to extend Israeli governance over settlements on Palestinian land:
Likud votes to annex settlements to Israel
The fly in the ointment for those who want to make Israel an exclusively Jewish state – or at least one with negligible minorities – is the presence of the Bedouin, inhabiting the land long before European Jews arrived. Amira Hass looks at the Israeli state’s methods of stopping them making themselves at home:
The Trump effect is considered by several commentators. The worst effect – for which we cannot blame Trump – is the Israeli state’s response to Palestinian protests:
So far, 14 children killed in Trump protests
Violence as the first recourse by Israel is underlined by Palestinian intellectual Rashid Khalidi in an interview with Democracy Now!
Only by killing can Israel hold down millions against their will
The lethal violence of Israeli security does not bother the hyper-wealthy American Jews who invest in Trump and Netanyahu. Philip Weiss says the great divide in U.S. foreign policy is not over Russia but over the extent of Israel’s influence. Can any opposition withstand the deluge of wealth that flows into Likud?:
Receiving very little coverage but important because of the role an imagined Hamas plays in the (non-existent) MEPP is the reports of the Hamas-Fatah reconciliation. Hamas has agreed to hand its weapons over to the PA! Why isn’t this front-page news? (of course, it may not happen):
Hamas wants to come in from the cold
And thank goodness for a rare bit of culture. Robert A. H. Cohen goes to the West End production of Oslo, a play about the peace process, and is disturbed by the assumption of symmetry between Israel and Palestine. The audience (minus Robert) loved it:
Personality blocks politics in Oslo drama