- B'Tselem, the Israeli human rights organization, addressed
it in its July 2010 report titled, "By Hook and By Crook: Israel's
Settlement Policy in the West Bank", ahead of a July 6 meeting between
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Obama, their fifth - a shameless
love fest endorsing Israeli crimes, Obama saying Israel has "got to
be able to respond to threats or any combination of threats in the region,"
ones it manufactures to pursue ruthless, lawless policies, nonviolent civilians
the victims.
-
- On July 5, Israeli National News.com writer Hillel Fendel
headlined, "Timed to Sabotage," quoting Yesha Council (YC) head
Danny Dayan calling B'Tselem "an anti-Zionist tool for the destruction
of Israel," citing the report and its report release date as one example.
-
- YC (the Hebrew acronym for Judea, Samaria, and Gaza)
is the successor to Gush Emunim ("Block of the Faithful"), the
militant pro-settlement movement committed to Palestinian displacement,
its members influential in Israeli politics, advocating a Greater Israel
exclusively for Jews, its ideology based on religious zealotry, its members
calling Cast Lead a religious war, its bogus justification for systemic
violence, barbarism, military occupation, land theft, and efforts to silence
truth.
-
- According to Dayan:
-
- "Not one Arab has been deprived of his land to build
Jewish homes in Judea and Samaria. Unlike in previous settlement enterprises,
such as the kibbutzim of several decades ago, when there was no other choice....Since
1974, not one piece of privately-owned Arab land has been confiscated -
and those that were, were totally compensated for, either in money or land,"
calling much in B'Tselem's report "an absolute lie," saying its
"concern for human rights....just an excuse....to weaken Israel."
-
- Other Israeli, Palestinian, and international human rights
organizations disagree, publishing volumes of confirming material, what
zealots like Dayan want suppressed or condemned if made public.
-
- In preparing its report, B'Tselem used official Israeli
data, including state comptroller statistics, Civil Administration maps,
and attorney Talia Sasson's material on Israeli outposts, based on documents
produced by Brig. General Baruch Spiegel.
-
- Combined they show a half million Israelis "living
over the Green Line: more than 300,000 in 121 settlements and about (100)
outposts, which control 42 per cent of....the West Bank, and the rest in
(12) neighborhoods" in Jerusalem Municipality annexed land.
-
- From inception, Israel's settlement policy has been based
on "an instrumental, cynical, and even criminal approach to international
law, local legislation, Israeli military orders, and Israeli law, (that's
facilitated the systematic) pilfering of land from Palestinians in the
West Bank," ongoing for decades to seize all valued areas, including
Jerusalem to make it exclusively Jewish.
-
- How? By bogusly declaring "state land," resulting
in the theft of about 16% of the West Bank, mostly from 1979 - 1992, but
the process remains ongoing.
-
- The State Attorney's Office interpretation of the Ottoman
Land Law, in fact, "contradicted explicit statutory provisions and
judgments of the Mandatory Supreme Court," facilitating land seizures,
including privately owned Palestinian property, expropriated illegally,
comprising 21% of settlement areas.
-
- To encourage migration, benefits and incentives are offered,
most settlements given National Priority Area A status, entitling them
to:
-
- -- quality, low-cost housing with subsidized mortgages;
-
- -- free education from age three and extended school
days;
-
- -- free transportation to and from schools, and higher
teacher salaries to attract qualified ones to move;
-
- -- for industry and agriculture, grants and subsidies,
indemnification from EU produce tariffs, significantly lower taxes than
inside the Green Line, and
-
- -- larger balancing grants to help settlements cover
deficits.
-
- Palestine belongs to the Palestinians, the UN's 1947
Resolution 181 artificially partitioning it, giving the choicest 56% to
Jews, the remainder to Palestinians with Jerusalem an international city
under a UN Trustee Council - a binding provision to this day.
-
- In 1948, Israel's "War of Independence" seized
another 22%, in total 78% of historic Palestine, the 1967 Six Day War taking
the rest, placing Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem under military
occupation, thereafter systematically violating international humanitarian
laws with regard to:
-
- -- illegal large and smaller-scale acts of aggression,
inflicting mass deaths, injuries and destruction, mostly against civilians;
-
- -- free movement, expression and the right of assembly;
-
- -- the universally acknowledged right of return;
-
- -- Palestinians' right to their own resources on their
own land, including water and extensive offshore gas reserves, stolen to
benefit Israel;
-
- -- East Jerusalem - annexed despite Security Council
Resolution 478, declaring Israel's July 1980 Jerusalem Law null and void
with no legal validity;
-
- -- the Separation Wall on expropriated land, about 12%
of the West Bank when completed (ruled illegal by the International Court
of Justice);
-
- -- Palestinians' access to their own land, air space,
coastal waters, and control of their borders;
-
- -- illegally incarcerating thousands of political prisoners;
-
- -- systematically using torture, abuse and degrading
treatment, illegal at all times, under all conditions, with no allowed
exceptions;
-
- -- conducting targeted assassinations and other willful
killings of non-combatant civilians;
-
- --bogusly calling Palestine's democratically elected
government "terrorist," refusing recognition, imposing an embargo,
and conducting regular incursions against it;
-
- -- committing slow motion genocide against 1.5 million
Gazans under seige, Israel's so-called easing mostly subterfuge to keep
it harshly in place; and
-
- -- decades of illegal settlement building on expropriated
land, dispossessing protected persons, transferring their property to Jews,
claiming bogus legal justification for whatever it does, absolution for
being Jewish, the exceptionalism notion America uses, international law
valid only for others, not themselves.
- In fact, it's universally binding, Israel, like America,
a serial abuser, B'Tselem explaining:
-
- "Israel has ignored the relevant rules of law, adopting
its own interpretation, which is not accepted by almost all leading jurists
around the world and by the international community," its settlement
enterprise one of many infringements of Palestinian rights, including:
-
- -- the right of property denied by land theft;
-
- -- equality and due process under military occupation;
-
- -- the right "to an adequate standard of living,"
official policy to deny it to non-Jews;
-
- -- the right of free movement, expression, assembly,
and self-determination under a viable Palestinian state or one nation for
all citizens alike, what virtually all other countries allow inside fixed
borders, not flexible ones so Israel can illegally expand.
-
- B'Tselem's report, like many others, exposes the "cloak
of (illegality) that Israel has sought to (justify the) theft of West Bank
(and East Jerusalem) land," an illegal way it "advance(s its)
political objectives," by infringing on the rights of others - Palestinians,
persecuted by successive regimes, claiming democratic credentials, revealed
as ruthless, barbarous, and lawless against non-Jews, what growing millions
globally are discovering, including many thousands of Jews, condemning
what they'll no longer tolerate, nor should anyone.
-
- A Final Note
-
- Even Israeli Jews are oppressed, heroic whistleblower/prisoner
of conscience Mordechai Vanunu perhaps the most noted.
-
- After being incarcerated for 18 years for exposing Israel's
secret nuclear program, he was imprisoned again on May 23, charged with
contacting a foreign national, despite his legal right to do it, his right
of free expression.
-
- Then on June 18, Amnesty International (AI) reported
him in solitary confinement, Malcolm Smart, AI's Middle East Program director
explaining:
-
- "Mordechai Vanunu should not be in prison at all,
let alone....in solitary confinement in a unit intended for violent criminals.
He suffered immensely when he was held in solitary confinement for 11 years
after his imprisonment in 1986 and to return him to such conditions now
is nothing less than cruel, inhuman (and) degrading."
-
- After his April 2004 release, he was prohibited from
leaving the country, approaching foreign embassies, and communicating with
foreigners, including journalists, as well as required to get permission
to change his address. In addition, a draconian military order, renewed
biannually, kept him under surveillance and police supervision, denying
his fundamental rights to free movement, expression, and association.
-
- Held at central Israel's Ayalon Prison, his lawyer, Michael
Sfard, said he's "suffering from isolation. He should not be made
to pay a price because of the enmity of others towards him," recrimination
against anyone challenging state policies, an agenda above the law and
fundamental humanitarian principles - for over six decades, disregarded
and spurned, the way all rogue states operate, Israel today a global menace,
the region's most dangerous.
-
- Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at
lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com
and listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the
Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network Thursdays
at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs
are archived for easy listening.
-
- http://www.progressiveradionetwork.com/the-progressive-news-hour/.
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