A Palestinian committed to peace was supposed to speak at synagogues, churches, & universities across the U.S. about the power of nonviolence and bringing an end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He had a valid visa and had visited the U.S. before. Instead he was denied entry & sent back to Palestine without explanation.
Gideon Levy writes in Ha’aretz: “The apartheid did not start with him and will not end with his departure; it probably won’t even be dented. One of the most racist nations in the world cannot complain about its prime minister’s racism.”
Netanyahu: “Israel is not a state of all its citizens. According to the nation-state law we passed, Israel is the nation-state of the Jewish people — and not anyone else.”
Israel “destroyed 244 villages and built-up areas in the Golan and expelled their population, sparing only five villages (Majdal Shams, Buq’ata, Ain Qunya, Mas’ada and al-Ghajar). Not even places of worship, schools and health centres escaped destruction. The underlying aim of the occupation authorities was to eliminate Arab landmarks and obliterate the Arab identity of the Golan, as a result of which anyone who visits the Golan today is able to identify the locations of the former Arab villages only from their ruins…”
Addameer reports that since the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory in 1967, more than 800,000 Palestinians have been detained under Israeli military orders–approximately 20 percent of the total Palestinian population in the oPt and as much as 40 percent of the total male Palestinian population… 8,000 Palestinian children have been arrested since 2000. Boys and young men are seized in the dead of night, blindfolded and cuffed, abused and manipulated to confess to crimes they didn’t commit. Every year Israel arrests almost 1,000 Palestinian youngsters, some of them not yet 13.
A FAIR study finds that major US news outlets rarely mention the Right of Return, although it is a primary part of the Israel/Palestine issue. In the last ten years, only 0.01 percent of coverage of Palestinians or Palestine in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post informs its audience about the right of return or even mentions it at all. When they do mention it, they generally imply that it is not a legitimate, UN-conferred right; or they describe the exercise of that right as an act of aggression/national “suicide” for Israel.
Largely ignored by critics have been Israel’s increasing theocratic tendencies – the growth of Israel’s extremist religious population and the emergence of a class of influential rabbis who endorse the killing of non-Jews and preach genocide…
Israeli forces “have intentionally shot children. They have intentionally shot people with disabilities, they have intentionally shot journalists… We found that one person, a double amputee, was shot and killed as he sat in his wheelchair (see video). On two separate days, two people visibly walking on crutches, were shot in the head…”
The death of Hamdy Na’asan, shot in the back, was not an unexpected or isolated event. Amira Hass reports: “Land that is hard to steal by means of Israeli laws – the masterpiece of our finest legal scholars – is stolen by means of the settlers’ violent, sacred fire and code of silence.”
Today marks the 25th anniversary of Israeli settler Baruch Goldstein’s massacre of 29 Palestinians as they prayed. Israeli soldiers blocked Palestinians who tried to flee and who wanted to enter to help the victims. The repercussions of the attack are still felt by Palestinians in Hebron, who have seen their rights eroded and their formerly bustling city centre turn into a ghost town.