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FUTURE OF AL AQSA and AL QUDS
#31
TURKEY MUST LEAD A MUSLIM PROTECTION FORCE TO PROTECT
AL AQSA, PALESTINE  

Zaid Hamid
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#32
SIX DAYS THAT CHANGED THE MIDDLE EAST: 
THE ARAB-ISRAELI WAR



PALESTINE 1920:
THE OTHER SIDE OF THE PALESTINIAN STORY



MAPS   VANISHING PALESTINE
https://interactive.aljazeera.com/aje/palestineremix/maps_main.htm

Creating a Jewish state in Palestine was a deliberate, drawn-out and violent process. Palestinians were dispossessed of vast swathes of land. Over 80 percent of Palestinians in what became Israel in 1948 were made into refugees overnight. The process may have culminated in 1948, but it had begun in the early 20th century – and it still continues today.

To create the State of Israel, Zionist forces attacked major Palestinian cities and destroyed some 530 villages. Approximately 13,000 Palestinians were killed in 1948, with more than 750,000 expelled from their homes and becoming refugees – the climax of the Zionist movement’s ethnic cleansing of Palestine. Today, the refugees and their descendants number more than seven million. Many still languish in refugee camps in neighbouring Arab countries, waiting to return to their homeland.

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ETHNIC CLEANSING OF PALESTINE

To create the State of Israel, Zionist forces attacked major Palestinian cities and destroyed some 530 villages. Approximately 13,000 Palestinians were killed in 1948, with more than 750,000 expelled from their homes and becoming refugees – the climax of the Zionist movement’s ethnic cleansing of Palestine. Today, the refugees and their descendants number more than seven million. Many still languish in refugee camps in neighbouring Arab countries, waiting to return to their homeland.

DRONE FOOTAGE


QISARYA

Palmach, a Zionist military unit whose commanders included Yitzhak Rabin, expelled the village’s Palestinian inhabitants in February 1948.
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JAFFA

After Haganah, the pre-state Zionist paramilitary organisation, expelled its inhabitants, less than 4,000 Palestinians remained. They are ghettoised in the Ajami district. Today, Israel includes Jaffa within Tel Aviv municipality.

ACRE
Israeli forces captured Acre in May 1948
There are still relics of fortifications, including a wall and a tower, from that period.
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JERUSALEM

The capital and the holiest city in historic Palestine. Over 80 percent of the city was captured by Zionists in 1948 and the remaining 20 percent, now known as East Jerusalem, was captured in 1967.RE VIDEO


THE SEPARATION WALL

A concrete and barbed wire wall built by Israel whose route lies predominantly inside the occupied West Bank. Construction began in 2002 and has resulted in the confiscation of Palestinian land by Israel and the ghettoisation of Palestinian communities.
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TEL AVIV

Founded in 1909 by the Zionist movement on the Mediterranean coast of historic Palestine, near Jaffa. It is the second most populous city in Israel, after Jerusalem. The Tel Aviv Metropolitan Area, which includes the Tel Aviv and Central Districts of Israel, contains 42 percent of Israel’s population.
 

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TEL AVIV

Today, Tel Aviv is an economic hub and serves as Israel’s financial capital. It is the fifth most visited city in the Middle East.
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HIGHWAY 6

Highway 6 runs from northern to southern Israel. One of Israel's largest infrastructure projects, it helps Israeli settlers commute between illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank and Israel.
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JORDAN VALLEY

The lowest point on earth. It includes the Dead Sea, which is 790 metres below sea level. The Jordan Valley is the border region between historic Palestine and Jordan. Politically, as long as there is an Israeli army presence in the Jordan Valley, there is no possibility of creating a viable Palestinian state in the occupied West Bank.
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SHUJAYEA

One of the largest neighbourhoods in Gaza City, with around 100,000 Palestinian residents. The area was frequently targeted by Israeli airstrikes in 2008-2009. During Israel's "Operation Protective Edge" in 2014, Israeli forces launched a massive military assault on the neighbourhood, killing at least 100 Palestinians and forcing residents to flee. “Shujayea” in Arabic means “courage”.
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AL SHATI REFUGEE CAMP
The Gaza Strip is one of the most densely populated places in the world. It is home to 1.8 million Palestinians, most of whom are the descendants of refugees expelled from other cities and villages in Palestine in 1948. One of the eight refugee camps in Gaza is Al-Shati Refugee Camp.
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GAZA PORT
The Gaza Strip’s small port is located near the Rimal district of Gaza City. It is the only port on the Mediterranean Sea where no ship from around the world is allowed to anchor, due to Israel’s occupation of the territory since 1967 and blockade.
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RIMAL
One of the most prosperous neighbourhoods in Gaza City, its main street connects the coastline with the old city.



PALESTINE IS NOT OCCUPIED, IT IS COLONISED  
Ramzy Baroud 


June 5 2018 marks the 51st anniversary of the Israeli occupation of East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza. But, unlike the massive popular mobilisation that preceded the anniversary of the Nakba – the catastrophic destruction of Palestine in 1948 – on 15 May the anniversary of the occupation is hardly generating equal mobilisation. 

The unsurprising death of the ‘peace process’ and the inevitable demise of the ‘two-state solution’ has shifted the focus from ending the occupation per se to the larger, and more encompassing, problem of Israel’s colonialism throughout Palestine. Grassroots mobilisation in Gaza and the West Bank, and among Palestinian Bedouin communities in the Naqab Desert, are, once more, widening the Palestinian people’s sense of national aspirations. Thanks to the limited vision of the Palestinian leadership those aspirations have, for decades, been confined to Gaza and the West Bank. 

In some sense the ‘Israeli occupation’ is no longer an occupation as per international standards and definitions. It is merely a phase of the Zionist colonisation of historic Palestine, a process that began over a 100 years ago, and carries on to this day.  “The law of occupation is primarily motivated by humanitarian consideration; it is solely the facts on the ground that determine its application”, states the International Committee of the Red Cross website

It is for practical purposes that we often utilise the term ‘occupation’ with reference to Israel’s colonisation of Palestinian land, occupied after 5 June 1967. The term allows for the constant emphasis on humanitarian rules that are meant to govern Israel’s behavior as the occupying power.

However, Israel has already, and repeatedly, violated most conditions of what constitute an ‘occupation’ from an international law perspective, as articulated in the 1907 Hague Regulations (articles 42-56) and the 1949 Fourth Geneva Convention. According to these definitions, an ‘occupation’ is a provisional phase, a temporary situation that is meant to end with the implementation of international law regarding that particular situation. 

Military occupation’ is not the sovereignty of the occupier over the occupied; it cannot include the transfer of citizens from the territories of the occupying power to occupied land; it cannot include ethnic cleansing; destruction of properties; collective punishment and annexation. It is often argued that Israel is an occupier that has violated the rules of occupation as stated in international law. This would have been the case a year, two or five years after the original occupation had taken place, but not 51 years later. Since then, the occupation has turned into long-term colonisation. 

An obvious proof is Israel’s annexation of occupied land, including the Syrian Golan Heights and Palestinian East Jerusalem in 1981. That decision had no regard for international law, humanitarian law or any other law. Israeli politicians have, for years, openly debated the annexation of the West Bank, especially areas that are populated with illegal Jewish settlements, which are built contrary to international law.

Those hundreds of settlements that Israel has been building in the West Bank and East Jerusalem are not meant as temporary structures. Dividing the West Bank into three zones, areas A, B and C, each governed according to different political diktats and military roles, has little precedent in international law. Israel argues that, contrary to international law, it is no longer an occupying power in Gaza; however, an Israel land, maritime and aerial siege has been imposed on the Strip for over 11 years. From successive Israeli wars that have killed thousands, to a hermetic blockade that has pushed the Palestinian population to the brink of starvation, Gaza subsists in isolation. 

Gaza is an ‘occupied territory’ by name only, without any of the humanitarian rules applied. In the last 10 weeks alone, over 120 unarmed protesters, journalists and medics were killed and 13,000 wounded, yet the international community and law remain inept, unable to face or challenge Israeli leaders or to overpower equally cold-hearted American vetoes.

The Palestinian Occupied Territories have, long ago, crossed the line from being occupied to being colonised. But there are reasons that we are trapped in old definitions, leading amongst them is American political hegemony over the legal and political discourses pertaining to Palestine. One of the main political and legal achievements of the Israeli war – which was carried out with full US support – on several Arab countries in June 1967 is the redefining of the legal and political language on Palestine. Prior to that war, the discussion was mostly dominated by such urgent issues as the ‘Right of Return’ for Palestinian refugees to go back to their homes and properties in historic Palestine. 

The June war shifted the balance of power completely, and cemented America’s role as Israel’s main backer on the international stage. Several UN Security Council resolutions were passed to delegitimise the Israeli occupation: UNSCR 242, UNSCR 338, and the less talked about but equally significant UNSCR 497. 

Resolution 242 of 1967 demanded “withdrawal of Israel armed forces” from the territories it occupied in the June war. Resolution 338, which followed the war of 1973, accentuated and clarified that demand. Resolution 497 of 1981 was a response to Israel’s annexation of the Golan Heights. It rendered such a move “null and void and without international and legal affect”. The same applied to the annexation of Jerusalem as to any colonial constructions or any Israeli attempts aimed at changing the legal status of the West Bank. 

But Israel is operating with an entirely different mindset. Considering that anywhere between 600,000 to 750,000 Israeli Jews now live in the ‘Occupied Territories’, and that the largest settlement of Modi’in Illit houses more than 64,000 Israeli Jews, one has to wonder what form of military occupation blue-print Israel is implementing, anyway? Israel is a settler colonial project, which began when the Zionist movement aspired to build an exclusive homeland for Jews in Palestine, at the expense of the native inhabitants of that land in the late 19th century. Nothing has changed since. Only facades, legal definitions and political discourse. The truth is that Palestinians continue to suffer the consequences of Zionist colonialism and they will continue to carry that burden until that original sin is boldly confronted and justly remedied. 

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HOW ISRAEL's VIOLENT BIRTH DESTROYED PALESTINE
http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2017/04/israel-violent-birth-destroyed-palestine-
170424114255909.html

Dr Ramzy Baroud has been writing about the Middle East for more than 20 years. He is an internationally syndicated columnist, a media consultant, an author of several books and the founder of PalestineChronicle.com. His books include Searching Jenin, The Second Palestinian Intifada, and his latest, My Father Was a Freedom Fighter: Gaza's Untold Story. 
Reply
#33
STAND FOR PALESTINE




The Zionist entity has once again unleashed her killing machine against the defenceless in Gaza, while the world watches and offers nothing more than cosmetic gestures to cover the crimes of this illegal state. As part of the noble Ummah of the Messenger of Allah (saw) it is not befitting for us to stand idle and to be quiet while this latest bloodshed is happening. The blood of Muslims has sanctity.



Abdullah ibn Umar (ra) narrated that he saw the Messenger of Allah (saw) making 



tawaf of the Ka’bah and saying,


“How delightful you are, and how great is your scent! How magnificent you are, and how great is your sanctity! But by the One in whose hand is the soul of Muhammad, the sanctity of a believer, his wealth and his blood, is greater in the sight of Allah than your sanctity, and we do not think of Him except good.” (Ibn Majah)





To show support for our brothers and sisters in Gaza, we must do the following actions based upon Islam.





1. Account the agent rulers for their inaction



The rulers in the Muslim world are a defence shield for the Zionist entity. While Muslim blood flows, these rulers show no concern over what is happening but instead send their armies for colonial projects in Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan and Pakistan. This is the despicable nature of these rulers and we must account them for their silence, complicity and conspiracies. The Messenger of Allah (saw) said:







“By Him in whose hand is my soul, you must command the Maroof and you must forbid the Munkar or Allah will be about to send a punishment from Him upon you. Then you will make Du’aa (supplication) to Him but you will not be responded to.” (At-Tirmidhi)







2. Reject Western intervention





Whenever a crisis erupts in the Ummah, with colonial fingerprints visible, it is the same colonial states and their colonial institutions that present solutions to the Ummah’s problems. These solutions are worthless and further their own interests. How many times have we seen the UN offer resolutions on Palestine but for them to be blocked by the United States or trampled all over by the Zionist entity? These Western solutions must be rejected as they bring nothing but more misery and humiliation on this noble Ummah.







3. Resist all plots to surrender Palestine through negotiations with the Zionist entity





We must say no to any negotiations with the Zionist entity and must not compromise on an inch of Palestine despite the bloodshed we witness, as this is nothing but submission to colonial plans to firmly implant this cancerous state in the Muslim world. We don’t accept a Palestinian state on pre-1967 borders as this legitimises the occupation of Muslim land which was taken since the Balfour Declaration in 1917. We cannot succumb to the reality and pressures, but must remain true to our belief and reject all negotiations which compromise the blessed land of Palestine.





4. Call on armies to mobilise





We have come to realise, regardless of the good intentions of many Muslims, that lobbying and boycotting will not end the bloodshed and occupation of Palestine. The Ummah is coming to realise, the Islamic solution is for the Muslim armies to move to defend the Muslims and Muslim land in Palestine. This is what is required and this is an obligation on the shoulders of the Muslim armies. We must be vocal in calling for the Muslim armies to mobilise as they have the material capability to uproot the Zionist entity and liberate Palestine. The Messenger of Allah said:





“Whosoever of you sees an evil, let him change it with his hand; and if he is not able to do so, then let him change it with his tongue; and if he is not able to do so, then with his heart – and that is the weakest of Iman.” (Muslim)







5. Work for Khilafah







Only the Khilafah Rashidah will bring about the liberation of Al-Quds, Syria, Kashmir, and all the other occupied lands. We must aid the global call for the re-establishment of the Khilafah: stand for it, call for it and work for it.


“Only the Imam is a shield, behind whom you fight and you protect yourself with, so if he orders by taqwa and is just then he has reward for that, and if he orders by other than that, then it is against himself.”



ILAN PAPPE : PALESTINIANS DON'T NEED US FOR THEIR STATEHOOD 


It is clear the US never had Palestinian interests in mind and they can now move on, prominent Israeli historian says




Ilan Pappe says Israelis have a false sense of security as they ignore the plight of Palestinians [Ali Younes/Al Jazeera]
  • Doha, Qatar - Prominent Israeli historian Ilan Pappe says US President Donald Trump's recognition of Jerusalem as Israel's capital has shown the Palestinians that Washington has no interest in helping them achieve statehood. 


In an interview with Al Jazeera in Qatar's capital, Doha, Pappe also said Trump's positions should make Palestinians realise that American intervention is not required to achieve peace.  Pappe, who is Jewish and born in Israel, said his support for the Palestinians to regain their homeland is driven by moral principles and his care about the future of Jews in historical Palestine.


He noted that even before Trump, past US administrations - including the one led by Barack Obama - were engaged in "double talk" to deceive the Palestinians into thinking they could rely on Washington to help mediate the creation of their own state. In reality, US governments only advanced and preserved the Zionist project in Palestine, including the expansion of settlements, he said.

Pappe, who has published 15 books on the Middle East, including The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, spoke on the sidelines of last weekend's 12th Al Jazeera Forum.





Ilan Pappe, director of the European Center of Palestine Studies, University of Exeter
Al Jazeera: The Palestinian National Council has convened for the first time in years. How you see the Palestinian situation today, with their divisions, and a US administration that undermined the basic understanding of previous peace negotiations?



Ilan Pappe: I think the whole peace process until now was built on initiatives that had nothing to do with the Palestinians. Palestinians did not have any initiative. They need to take initiatives and to be the ones who bring forward a programme. They did it in 1968, but that was the last time. It is time for a new Palestinian initiative that would not only represent the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, but the wider Palestinian community around the world. I hope they support one democratic state in all of Palestine.



Al Jazeera: As far as the US position on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, what has changed since Trump came to power?





Pappe: The Trump administration has created a new transparency. Before Trump, there was double talk by other American administrations. The Americans usually say something and then do the opposite, which includes presidents [Bill] Clinton, [George W] Bush and Obama. His decision on Jerusalem - by moving the American embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem - is a clear violation of international law. The question is how to deal with it given that we have a kind of childish American president with a lot of power.



Al Jazeera: What fuels the Trump administration's strong push towards adopting all of the Israeli positions and narratives?



Pappe: The support for Israel in the United States comes more from the Christian Zionist community who are Trump's base than from the Jewish community. The young Jewish American generation often disassociate themselves from Israel and question its behaviour. Most of the Christian Zionists support Israel because of their Christianity, not because they love Israel. It is a unique version of Christianity.
People often misunderstand the motivations behind supporting Israel in the Republican and Democratic parties. In the Democratic Party, they are pro-Israeli because of the success of the Israeli lobby. In the Republican Party, it has a lot to do with Christian Zionism.


Al Jazeera: How then should both Palestinians and their supporters deal with the Jerusalem decision and the policies of this administration?



Pappe: This position at least releases the Palestinians from the belief that peace must only come through the American system, or a Pax-Americana. It allows you to develop different thinking about a possible solution. A solution that does not need necessarily an American intervention or one based on an Israeli-American interpretation of what is a solution. In addition, a different solution that listens to the Palestinian demands and aspirations is needed.

Al Jazeera: Arab regimes have long held the belief that 99 percent of the solution to the Middle East conflict must come through American intervention, which they depend on for their own protection and survival. Is this still a valid assumption?



Pappe: I think this is very difficult to see with Trump. On one hand, he talks about isolationist policies where he wants America not to interfere, but when he wants to interfere he does that with force. I think we should not be obsessed or wait for the American initiative. We should take the initiative on the ground itself. In addition, I think there is a difference between governments and societies. Governments are afraid to say we can move on without an American green light. Societies, however, should send a message to their elites: "Yes, you can". In addition, you don't need an American red light or green light. What you need is to think about principles to the solution that are adopted to the 21st century, which put a focus on human rights and civil rights.

Al Jazeera: What should people think about when it comes to solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and what should be the parameters for both Jews and Palestinians?



Pappe: A new-old thinking about Palestine is needed. We should aim to create one democratic state and a decolonisation process of the Zionist ideology in Palestine, though this is not going to happen tomorrow. It would be deluding people by telling them it would happen tomorrow or that it is an easy road. No, it is a very difficult road giving the American support for Israel and the American ideology, coupled with the Arab world's disunity and the disunity in the Palestinian camp.

This means it will be a very long period before we can achieve it. However, it is much better to go on the long road knowing that this is the end game than going on the short road - as we did in Oslo that looked very clear like the two-state solution but ended up with more occupation, more oppression and more suffering of the Palestinian people.

Al Jazeera: You talk about the decolonisation process in Palestine, meaning as you put it ending the project of Zionism in Palestine, which was a nationalist European conception. What then would happen to Israeli Jews, many of whom are ardent Zionists?



Pappe: The Jews in Palestine are six million people and they are a third generation of settlers. In other [/b]

parts of the world, third-generation settlers, like in South Africa, are entitled to have their ethnic and political rights, only if they are not at the expense of the indigenous population. In addition, I think that many Jews in Israel do not understand that they live a precarious life, even if they feel very secure. But in reality, they are not. I normally use this metaphor to describe the Jewish situation in Palestine, which is that even if you are staying at the best cabin on the Titanic, you are still on the Titanic. If the ship goes, you go. And they don't realise it.


Look, I am an Israeli Jew who was born in Israel. I care about the people. My family is there. I am doing it because I mainly believe it is morally just, but I also think it is for their future.

Al Jazeera: The Oslo agreement in 1993 envisioned an independent Palestinian state in five years. Today there are about 800,000 settlers in the West Bank. Is the two-state solution still viable?


Pappe: I think until now we had the double talk of Americans, and whether America was willing to use its power to impose a more flexible position on Israel is questionable. I think the moment they gave their total support through moving the embassy from Tel Aviv to occupied Jerusalem shows that the American government cannot play a constructive role, even though some people in the West Bank think the two-state solution would end the Israeli occupation of the West Bank. I think they are wrong. I think they would wake up one day and understand that we need a different solution - not a two-state solution.



BALFOUR UK GOVERNMENT 'SHOULD HANG ITS HEAD IN SHAME'
Mersiha Gadzo
http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2017/10/ba...45226.html

BALFOUR MERRYMAKING A POTENTIAL PR DISASTER FOR THE BRITISH GOVERNMENT 

THE BALFOUR DECLARATION ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF GOYIM SOLITUDE
http://www.gilad.co.uk/writings/2017/11/...m-solitude
Reply
#34
ISRAELI REGIME PUSHING MIDDLE EAST TO WAR : 
TURKISH PRESIDENT ERDOGAN 

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has lambasted the Israeli regime for its use of “unnecessary aggression” in Syria following recent Israeli airstrikes in the war-torn Arab country, saying Tel Aviv is dragging the Middle East into war.  The Turkish president made the comments in an interview with BBC Arabic on Sunday, saying the occupying regime “is sowing fear and pushing” the Middle East “region to war.”   Erdogan also denounced the Israeli aerial aggression against the sovereignty of Syria, three days after Israeli warplanes attacked dozens of “targets” inside the Arab country in what was said to be the most extensive strike in Syria in decades. 


Over the past few years, Israel has frequently attacked military targets in Syria in what is considered as an attempt to prop up terrorist groups that have been suffering heavy defeats against Syrian government forces, which has been fighting against foreign-sponsored militant outfits since 2011. Israel has also been providing weapons to anti-Damascus militants as well as medical treatment to the Takfiri elements wounded in Syria.

In late March, the Turkish leader also “strongly” condemned Israeli troops’ “inhumane attack” on Palestinian demonstrators on the border of the besieged Gaza Strip, a day after the Israeli military killed 16 unarmed Palestinian protesters. As for May 13, the death toll stands at 53. “Have you heard any noteworthy objections to the massacre by Israel that happened yesterday in Gaza from those who criticize the Afrin operation?” Erdogan asked during a speech he delivered in Istanbul on March 31. He was referring to Ankara’s cross-border military operation in Syria’s enclave of Afrin against the militants of the US-backed Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG), whom the Turkish government views as terrorists. Afrin was captured on March 18.


Elsewhere in his remarks, Erdogan criticized the controversial decision made on Tuesday by US President Donald Trump in pulling out of the landmark, multinational and hard-fought nuclear agreement with Iran, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). The JCPOA came out of years of negotiations between Iran on one side and the P5+1 group of countries, the United States, Britain, France, Russia and China plus Germany, on the other, in July 2015. A day after Trump’s provocative decision, which triggered international condemnations, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) issued a statement, reiterating that Iran is in full compliance with the terms of the JCPOA.

DRAFT DODGER IN CHIEF DODGES HISTORIC OPENING OF US EMBASSY

NAKBA DAY 

May 15 is Nakba Day when Palestinians commemorate their expulsion from Palestine by Zionists and their subsequent dispossession. Nakba Day is about telling the story of how Israel was created by a process of theft of land and ethnic cleansing. It is about telling the world that Israel has sustained itself by occupation, oppression and war.  750,000 Palestinians were expelled from their homes by the Zionists and most of them and their descendants now live in Third World conditions in refugee camps around the Middle East. In total, there are now over seven million Palestinian refugees.


FOR PALESTINIANS US EMBASSY MOVE CEMENTS OCCUPATION STATUS QUO 
Controversial relocation won't change 'Palestinians' will', Jerusalem residents say, amid call for large-scale protests.
Linah Alsaafin

Occupied East Jerusalem - Tens of thousands of Jewish settlers, surrounded by police protection, have marched around the Old City, celebrating Jerusalem Day on the eve of the US embassy move from Tel Aviv.  The annual event, which commemorates the Israeli annexation of occupied East Jerusalem in 1967, is regarded by the city's Palestinian population as a deliberate provocation.  Past events have seen Palestinian-owned stores smashed up and Palestinian counter-protests being viciously suppressed by Israeli police.

Like in previous years, road closures and barricades were set up on Sunday to heavily restrict Palestinians from accessing the road leading to Damascus Gate, one of the entrances to the Old City. "The Palestinian Jerusalemite today lives with a hundred sticks raining down his head," Osama Barham, an activist in the city, told Al Jazeera. "That is to say, he is oppressed from all directions."

Barham was standing off to one side nearby Damascus Gate, where a small group of Palestinian and Arab media outlets had gathered. Below them, a large congregation of white and blue had amassed on the stone steps. Some danced in rings in a frenetic way. Others shouted slogans in fervor. "The US embassy move is not the most important issue here," Barham said, explaining that for Palestinian residents such a development was merely the expected outcome after decades of occupation.  "We were not shocked or surprised to hear the news when US President Donald Trump announced [in December 2017] his recognition of Jerusalem as Israel's capital," he added.

"What is much more dangerous to us than an embassy move is our reality: the onslaught of the Judaisation of the city, the Israelification of our society, the exile of Palestinian residents, the demolishment of Palestinian homes and the raiding of the al-Aqsa compound by settlers."
"Jerusalem is under occupation so we do not feel like we are suddenly in trouble because of the embassy's new location in west Jerusalem," Barham added.  The singing and chanting of the settlers' drowned the drums and trumpets of a marching band in their midst. A huge roar went up as Israeli police removed a barricade and allowed the settlers to stream into the Old City.

Marchers wave Israeli flags at Damascus Gate in Jerusalem's Old City [Baz Ratner/Reuters] 


'The heart of the Palestinian cause'. Earlier, hundreds of settlers raided the al-Aqsa Mosque compound, the third-holiest site in Islam. They raised the Israeli flag and prayed there. Confrontations with Palestinians ensued, resulting in at least one arrest, before the settlers left the compound.

Is the US undermining the Middle East peace process?


Inside the Old City, in the neighbourhood of Sheikh Lulu, Umm Jihad stood outside her house, keeping an eye out on her children and giving directions to men finding difficulty reaching their own homes due to the Israeli-imposed closures. "I hope that many people will be out protesting tomorrow because we need as much support as possible," she told Al Jazeera, referring to the planned demonstrations on Monday against the embassy relocation.  "Today, we cannot move around the city because the Israeli forces have practically barricaded us in our own homes."

She said the US embassy move would not change the "will of the Palestinians".  "No one will remain silent in the face of what the US and Israel are doing," she said.  "Jerusalem is the heart of the Palestinian cause, and every Palestinian who lives here feels its significance in their very bones."

Arab world 'silent'
The official opening of the US embassy, which will take place at 1pm local time (10:00 GMT) will be attended by an American delegation, which includes Trump's daughter Ivanka and her husband Jared Kushner, who is also an adviser to the president. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu hosted a gala reception on Sunday afternoon for the US delegation. The reception extended an open invitation to all of the Knesset members. Foreign dignitaries were also invited, but most of the European ambassadors said they would boycott the event.

Afaf al-Dajani: "I don't understand why the Arab world is silent" [Linah Alsaafin/Al Jazeera] 

Standing on the road opposite of Damascus Gate, Afaf al-Dajani, head of an orphanage association in the Old City, cut a lone figure in the early evening light as she looked at the thinning crowds of Jewish settlers. "Of course we will suffer with this new embassy location," she told Al Jazeera.  "We already suffer from the presence of all these settlers, and I imagine the US embassy's new site will encourage more of this."  She took in a wavering breath as Israeli police mounted on soldiers clopped by.  "I don't understand why the Arab world is silent about all of this and are watching these events as if it is a movie in a cinema," she said. "Where are their consciences?"  But for Barham, the fate of the Palestinian residents of the city was clear since the Israeli occupation more than 50 years ago.

"We never relied on outside intervention or the Arab armies to come to our rescue," he said.
[b]"We understood that we would be alone in this battle against occupation."[/b]


ISRAEL’s VIOLENCE ON 
GAZANS’ NONVIOLENCE 
May 11, 2018

Norman Finkelstein says that Israeli forces have conducted “a murderous assault on non-violent protesters” in Gaza’s Great March of Return because non-violent protest threatens not Israel, but its occupation


DEATH TOLL FOR GAZA’s MARCH OF RETURN KEEPS RISING , CALL FOR INTERNATIONAL PROTECTION 
May 11, 2018
Noor Harazeen reports from Gaza about the seventh week of the “March of Return” protests, which left two more dead and 200 injured from shots fired by the Israeli military at the protests


SIXTH CONSECUTIVE WEEK OF FRIDAY GAZA PROTESTS LEAVE OVER 160 WOUNDED
May 4, 2018
For the sixth consecutive week Palestinians in Gaza headed to the Israeli border to demonstrate the “Great March of Return.” Israeli soldiers continued their attacks on the protesters, wounding over 160. Noor Harazeen reports from Gaza


ISRAELI FORCES KILL 4 PALESTINIANS, INJURE 40 ON ISRAEL’s INDEPENDENCE DAY 
April 20, 2018

Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip continue to demonstrate even though they know they put their lives at risk because life in the “cage” that is Gaza is intolerable, says Ali Abunimah of The Electronic Intifada
https://therealnews.com/stories/israeli-...ndence-day


ISRAEL MOWS DOWN UNARMED GAZA PROTESTORS

FOR 3rd WEEK AS US BLOCKS UN INVESTIGATION 
April 14, 2018

Israeli soldiers wounded more than 900 peaceful Palestinian protesters on the Gaza border for the third Friday in a row, while the Donald Trump administration prevents any action by the United Nations – Ben Norton reports
https://therealnews.com/stories/israel-m...estigation


HAMAS AND FATAH : WHY THE TWO GROUPS ARE FAILING 

Palestinian factions need to reinvent themselves and find successful strategies to give the public hope, analysts say.

Jonathan Cook

The Palestinian national movement, which has led the decades-long struggle against Israel's takeover of Palestine, has reached the lowest ebb in its history, according to analysts. But as Palestinians mark this week the 70th anniversary of the Nakba, the "Catastrophe" that followed the dispossession of their homeland and the creation of Israel in its place, there are signs of possible change.


For more than a quarter of a century, the Palestinian movement has been split into two increasingly irreconcilable ideological factions, Fatah and Hamas - now reflected in a profound geographical divisionbetween their respective strongholds of the occupied West Bank and Gaza.



Both camps have not only failed to bring about any significant achievements, say analysts, but illegal Jewish settlements have steadily spread across the West Bank and a 12-year blockade, bolstered by Israeli military attacks, has choked Gaza into a humanitarian disaster.



There is no tangible regional or international support for the Palestinian cause, and the Trump administration barely bothers to conceal its role now as a cheerleader for Israel.


INSIDE STORY: Can Palestinian protests achieve anything? (25:01)




That includes a decision to move its embassyto Jerusalem this week, effectively recognising Israel's claim on a city Palestinians regard as their future capital"The Palestinian national movement has moved beyond crisis to the point of bankruptcy," said Ghassan Khatib, a former cabinet minister in the Palestinian Authority (PA), and now a lecturer at Bir Zeit University, near Ramallah.

"Neither the armed resistance of Hamas nor the diplomacy of Fatah has made any gains," he told Al Jazeera. "They are failed governments, and the public is deeply dissatisfied."

The dire situation has left observers wondering whether the Palestinian national movement can reinvent itself and find more successful strategies over the coming years and decades.

Both Fatah and Hamas are preparing for major demonstrations, hoping to bring attention to decades of oppressive Israeli rule. But the events are also likely to underscore how much ground they have lost to Israel - and how the pressure for new thinking is coming from the ground up, not from the leadership. Recent weeks have seen regular protests at Gaza's perimeter fence attracting tens of thousands of Palestinians and dominated by young people. The emphasis has been on direct, non-violent mass action, spurning the high-level diplomacy of Fatah and Hamas' traditional commitment to armed resistance.



Although the Gaza protests - under the banner of the Great March of Return –-were not initiated by Hamas, it had shown a willingness to support them, noted Diana Buttu, a former legal adviser to the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). "Hamas has recognised the utility of the marches," she told Al Jazeera. "It adopted them rather than crushed them. The hope must be that Fatah will soon realise this too - that they understand there is utility to people resisting."

Ahmed Al-Naouq, a youth activist in Gaza, pointed out that the focus of the protests was the demand that the refugees - a large majority of Gaza's population - be allowed to return to the lands, now in Israel, they were expelled from in 1948. "In Gaza, we are more creative and flexible in our thinking because we have no other choice. We want to break out of this prison," he told Al Jazeera. "My father worked for many years inside Israel. We are ready to live alongside Israeli Jews in peace – they need to set aside their fears."



Nathan Thrall, a local analyst with the International Crisis Group, a conflict resolution organisation based in Washington and Brussels, pointed out that the Gaza protests were returning the Palestinian struggle to its historical roots. "Even before the founding of the PLO, the central issue in Palestinian nationalism was the refugees - more so than the 1967 issue [of the occupation]," he told Al Jazeera. The right of the 750,000 Palestinians made refugees by the 1948 war and their descendants to return to their ancestral lands originally lay at the heart of the platforms of all the political parties," he said. "The national movement slowly compromised on that."

Under the Oslo process launched in 1993, it was widely assumed that the refugees, if they returned at all, would move to a separate and minimal Palestinian state rather than their former towns and villages. "There was an intentional ambiguity: the leadership talked about the right of return at the same time as it promoted the two-state solution, even though the two principles appear contradictory," said Thrall. But the Palestinians' historic compromise had turned into a dead-end."The two-state idea was never seen as ideal. No one marches for it or is prepared to sacrifice their life for it," he said. "But that pragmatism has yielded no results and has led to great popular disenchantment. Now ordinary people are going back to the roots of the Palestinian issue."

That appears to return Palestinian nationalism to its original vision of a single state, as long propounded by the PLO under its leader Yasser Arafat. He only accepted the partition of historical Palestine in the late 1980s, faced with overwhelming western pressure. "It is significant that there has been a steady increase in support for one state among the Palestinian public, now at around 30 percent," Buttu said. "That is surprising, given that today, not one Palestinian party, in the West Bank and Gaza or the 48 areas [of Israel], publicly supports it."

Even Hamas, she said, had effectively followed Fatah and abandoned its traditional goal of Palestinian-Islamic rule over all of historical Palestine. "Gradually Hamas has adopted the two-state formula, plus, in its case, a long-term truce with Israel," Buttu said.

'Critical gap'

In an indication of Hamas' growing desire to compromise, Israeli media reportedthis month that "unprecedented strategic distress" had led the movement to offer Israel a truce in return for easing the blockade and allowing it to rebuild Gaza's infrastructure. What was evident, said Khatib, was a "critical gap" between the national leaderships and Palestinian public opinion, especially among the youth.

The latter was increasingly interested in popular, non-violent struggle as a way to break out of the Palestinians' isolation. "But there are strong vested interests that will try to maintain the current situation," he said, pointing to the Palestinians' dependence on foreign donors, Israel's control over the transfer of income to the PA, and, in turn, the vast number of families relying on PA salaries. "Neither Fatah nor Hamas are in a position to advance popular struggle. They are bureaucratic governments, with structures, leaders and ideologies that militate against non-violence as a tactic."

But Khatib and others admit that change is likely to happen - some think rapidly - once 82-year-old Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas departs the scene. Asad Ghanem, a politics professor at Haifa University, said ending the factionalism was a precondition for turning the different parties into an effective vehicle of national struggle. "There must be a unified national movement," he told Al Jazeera. "The PA has to stop being the security contractor for Israel. Then we can solve the real problems. We must demand an elected and unified leadership with a single platform." The biggest problem currently facing the Palestinian national movement, said Buttu, was that, despite its various institutions, it was dominated by one person in the figure of Abbas. "Abbas has made all these institutions irrelevant, and they have allowed themselves to become irrelevant," she said.

"That has entirely marginalised other approaches, like boycotts and the one-state solution. It has ensured the alternatives can't be effective." She noted that Abbas had all but ignored imprisoned Fatah leader Marwan Barghouti during the Palestinian prisoners' hunger strike last summer. Barghouti is widely reported to be a student of non-violent strategies of resistance like those of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. He is said to have found support among the jailed leaders of Hamas and Islamic Jihad. "Look at the difference between the way the ANC [in South Africa] kept attention on Nelson Mandela while he was in jail," said Buttu. "They made sure people knew who he was. But Abbas has done his best to extinguish Barghouti, so young people barely know who he is after so many years behind bars. "The prisoners are a hugely powerful and symbolic issue for Palestinians, and yet Abbas has preferred not to capitalise on it."



With Abbas gone, Thrall thinks Fatah and Hamas may be capable of adapting to new thinking. "But they will do so only if there is a groundswell of popular sentiment that forces them to," he said. He pointed to the decisions in January of the PLO's Central Council to urge the ending of security cooperation with Israel, which Abbas has previously termed "sacred", and to adopt the anti-apartheid-like struggle of the boycott (BDS) movement, even though it conflicts with Abbas's strategy. Thrall said the moves reflected pressure, in the case of security cooperation, from the Palestinian public and, in the case of BDS, from civil society organisations in the West Bank and Gaza. Buttu noted that Palestinians were still conducting popular forms of struggle, despite the lack of institutional support. "Look to the Ahed Tamimis," she said, referring to the 17-year-old girl arrestedand jailed for slapping an Israeli soldier who invaded her home.


"She isn't choosing to be a teenager like her peers around the world. She chooses to resist; she is defiant like the rest of her village of Nabi Saleh. The same is true of those marching in Gaza. "At the moment they have to operate as one-offs, because of the failure of the bigger political structures."  Thrall observed that what happens in occupied East Jerusalem could prove decisive. Israel, he noted, was extremely concerned about large numbers of Palestinians there seeking Israeli citizenship and voting in city elections.  "If a majority starts applying for citizenship that could prove to be a deadly blow to a two-state solution, and it could happen very rapidly," he said.


"Then the PA would no longer speak on behalf of Palestinians in East Jerusalem, which is supposed the future Palestinian capital." That might be the point at which Palestinians were driven into mass protests for equal rights in a single state, along the lines of a civil rights or anti-apartheid struggle.Buttu agrees that Israel could be gravely mistaken in thinking it has crushed Palestinian nationalism.  "I often wonder what it looked like in Algeria in the 1930s or 40s, or in South Africa in the early 1980s," she said. "The French in Algeria and apartheid's leaders in South Africa thought they had the situation wrapped up, with a pretty ribbon on the package. They did not realise that in a few years everything would utterly change."

WATCH: PLO - History of a Revolution, Death and Decline (24:24)
Reply
#35
AL QUDS:  
TRIBUTE TO PALESTINIAN RESISTANCE 
https://crescent.icit-digital.org/articl...resistance

There is something remarkable about the fortitude and resilience of the Palestinian people in resisting 70 years of a brutal Israeli occupation, one of the longest military occupations in history.

More than 150 Palestinians have been massacred and over 12,000 wounded by trigger-happy Zionist soldiers discharging bone shattering explosive bullets at unarmed civilians during the six-week period beginning on March 30. Zionist soldiers went berserk on one day—May 14—when they shot and killed 62 Palestinians and injured thousands of others. This coincided with the Palestinians’ final day of Nakba protests.

Dubbed ‘The Great March of Return’, Palestinians peacefully sought their internationally sanctioned right to return to their homes. They have been under a strangulating siege in Gaza since 2007, deprived of the basic necessities of life, water, food and shelter.

Arab regimes, led by Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates and Egypt, not only failed to support Palestine’s quest for freedom but have joined Israel in enforcing its oppression.

Worse, the Palestinian Authority (PA) under Mahmoud Abbas continues its ‘security cooperation’ with the Zionist entity against its own people. This is reminiscent of the Vichy regime in France that colluded with the Nazi’s against the French.

It is the collaboration of these treacherous Arab regimes with Israel and the West that has made Gaza into a disaster zone, starving its two million people and caused its economy, health sector and infrastructure to collapse.

The PA has punitively deprived 65,000 employees of salaries leading to food insecurity and skyrocketing levels of poverty affecting 65% of Palestinians. Electricity is available for only four hours per day and 96% percent of Gaza’s water is undrinkable.

The rest of the ‘civilized and democratic’ world and International bodies barely whisper disapproval of Israel’s horrendous crimes committed with impunity. In fact, it manifests the complicity of the Western world with the repugnant Zionist regime.

It is extraordinary that the Palestinians, facing such odds for so long, still have the courage to persevere in their struggle for freedom and justice, spurning the Arab regimes’ capitulation to Israel.

“The old will die and the young will forget” is a statement attributed to David Ben Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, expressing the hope that future generations of Palestinians would eventually relinquish their claims to historical Palestine.

Not only has the Palestinian youth not forgotten their homes in occupied Palestine holding up their keys in protests, but also displayed incredible bravery in resolutely facing Israel’s ruthless military machine. Civil society throughout the world is beginning to take a stance against the Zionist Apartheid entity, forecasting Israel’s impending doom.

The boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement has grown exponentially to become a powerful tool demanding an end to Israel’s colonisation of Palestine, complete equality and the right of expelled Palestinians to return to their homes.

Universities, student organisations, labour unions and cultural institutions are cutting ties with their counterparts in Israel. Prominent artists and personalities have refused to perform or visit Israel. Newspaper editors and academics are rejecting the false anti-Semitic label to expose Israel’s inhumanity.

But it is the vulnerability of the Zionist military forces, founded on notions of terror and disproportionate force that originated from the Irgun and Lehi terror gangs, has shaken the foundations of the Zionist entity. Israel’s last convincing military victory was in 1967, when its forces decimated the Egyptian and Syrian armies in six days.

Subsequently, Israel has suffered a series of military defeats culminating in a humiliating loss in Lebanon to Hizbullah in 2006. Israel’s failure to subjugate the much smaller Hamas and Islamic Jihad resistance movements in Gaza in 2008/9, 2012 and 2014 has demoralised the Zionists occupiers.

Military analysts opine that if a guerrilla army survives an attack from a state, then it is victorious. A conventional army that fails to eradicate a resistance movement has suffered defeat. Author Bari Atwan observed that it is not only sophisticated weapons that determine the outcomes of wars, but also the strength of the combatants’ convictions and their willingness to fight until martyrdom—qualities the Palestinians clearly demonstrate.

Hizbullah in Lebanon, and Hamas and Islamic Jihad in Gaza, have become stronger despite the prolonged siege by Israel and betrayal of the Arab regimes. The Palestinians have broken the fear barrier, illustrated by the weekly peaceful protests that began on March 30.

This is epitomised in the last Facebook post of Razan Al-Najar, a 21-year-old volunteer medic, murdered by the Israelis as she ran toward the fortified border fence in a bid to reach a casualty, said “I am returning and not retreating, adding: Hit me with your bullets. I am not afraid.”

Israel, a militaristic society that glorifies military service and idolizes conscription, is now faced with a situation where tens of thousands of young Jewish men and women choose not to take part in the Israeli army. In fact, only about half of the eligible citizens enlist, and many more leave during their service. Israel Today and the annual “National Resilience Index” report released for the seventh annual Herzliya Conference, indicate that there was a drop of 10 percent in the level of trust the Jewish population in Israel has in the fighting and winning abilities of the Israeli forces.

Israeli studies show that due to the occupation, the level of fear in the Israeli public has risen dramatically. Not only has the invasions and occupation taken a heavy toll on the economy, it has shown that despite Israel’s superior military technology, it cannot defeat Hamas or Hizbullah and cannot achieve its strategic objectives.

A million Israelis live abroad, and surveys show that 37 percent of Israelis are considering a move to a different country at some time in the future. At the same time, it is noteworthy than only 2 percent of those surveyed said they are certain they will leave Israel—it is only a matter of time.

The Zionist Project was supposed to bring Jews to Israel. It is evident that Israel, an alien entity violently transplanted into the heart of the Arab and Muslim world, will never be transformed from enemy to friend.

Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu promised Jewish Settlers (illegal squatters) that he will stop the resistance rockets reaching the land they stole, but he has failed. Palestinian resistance has spread fear into the hearts of illegal Zionist squatters who spend most of their time in bomb shelters.

A new generation of Palestinians has crossed the fear barrier to emerge, stronger than ever, to confront Israel’s injustices and inhumane occupation. And in the words of Palestinian author Ramzy Baroud, when people are unafraid, they can never be subdued or defeated.


Dr Firoz Osman is with the Media Review Network, based in Johannesburg, South Africa





UN CONDEMNS ISRAEL's DEADLY ACTIONS ON GAZA FENCE 
http://www.presstv.com/Detail/2018/05/23...y-collapse

The United Nations Middle East envoy has stressed that "Gaza is on the verge of collapse." 

Nikolay Mladenov gave the warning while addressing the UN Security Council on Wednesday, where he called for urgent action to relieve the suffering of Gaza's "increasingly desperate" people. He added that people of Gaza were living with "crippling Israeli closures and with diminishing hopes for an end to the occupation and a political solution."

"Gaza's infrastructure teeters on the verge of total collapse, particularly its electricity and water networks as well as its health system," he noted.

Mladenov further called on the international community to join "in condemning in the strongest possible terms the actions that have led to the loss of so many lives in Gaza" since March.   

Israeli forces killed at least 62 Palestinians during protests near the Gaza fence on the eve of the 70th anniversary of the Nakba Day (Day of Catastrophe), which coincided with Washington’s embassy relocation from Tel Aviv to occupied Jerusalem al-Quds.

More than 2,700 Palestinians were also wounded as the Israeli forces used snipers, airstrikes, tank fire and tear gas to target the demonstrators.

PressTV-'Monday massacre a day of shame for Muslims'
Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations Gholamali Khoshroo says that Israel's Monday massacre of innocent Palestinians is a "day of shame" for the Muslim world.
The UN envoy also denounced Israeli settlement activities in the occupied West Bank.


PressTV-UNSC members want resolution on Israel settlements enforced
Most of the UN Security Council member states raise alarm over the non-implementation of an anti-Israel resolution adopted in December 2016.

He also stressed that dozens of Palestinian homes and structures have been destroyed recently as illegal construction goes on. Israel has been building settler units across the West Bank, including East Jerusalem (al-Quds), since 1967, when it occupied the territory during an all-out war.

About 600,000 Israelis live in over 230 settlements that are illegal under the international law, which prohibits construction on occupied land.
Reply
#36
JEWISH VOICES DECONSTRUCTING ZIONISM  


ILAN PAPPE:
THE ETHNIC CLEANSING OF PALESTINE




MIKO PELED:  
FREEDOM & JUSTICE: KEYS TO PEACE IN PALESTINE/ISRAEL




NORMAN FINKELSTEIN:
WHAT HAPPENED IN 1967
http://normanfinkelstein.com/2017/06/04/finkelstein-in-video-interview-what-really-happened-in-1967

WHY AMERICAN JEWS EMBRACED ISRAEL AFTER THE JUNE 1967 WAR 
https://therealnews.com/stories/nfinklestein0601part2

GAZA: AN INQUEST INTO ITS MARTYRDOM 



YEHUDA SHAUL:
BREAKING THE SILENCE 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JxHE4KrLvj0
Reply
#37
100 YEARS OF CONSPIRACY AGAINST PALESTINE & THE UMMAH
http://www.hizb.org.uk/multimedia/videos...tine-ummah



DOES THE UMMAH HAVE THE MEANS TO END THE OCCUPATION OF PALESTINE?

The Zionist entity since its formation has projected its military strength with the myth of invincibility. These multiple myths have been projected and propagated to subdue the ummah into submitting to its legitimacy. Many of these very myths have not only been actively expressed by the Zionists, but have been given life by the actions of various treacherous two-faced Muslim rulers. The article focuses on the reality of the Zionist’s military machine and compares this with the military capabilities of the surrounding Muslim countries.

The Zionist entity is in origin an artificial construct that the colonial powers inserted into the region. From 1900 until its creation in 1947, Zionists from Europe migrated in large numbers to Palestine. They proceeded to steal land from the inhabitants and expel them in order to found their illegal entity. This criminal history remains central to the Zionist’s security dilemma today. Its artificial nature means the Zionist entity suffers from significant geographic, economic, demographic and technological challenges that are permanent and unresolvable.

The most significant of these challenges is the entity’s lack of strategic depth. The country has less than 13,000 square miles of land, which makes it smaller than Wales. At its narrowest, the Zionist entity is a mere 6 miles wide. A hostile fighter could fly across its widest point (40 nautical miles wide from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea) in under four minutes. For these reasons, the Zionist entity has a densely packed population.[1]

The Zionist entity is small in terms of its demography. Its population is about 8.5 million people. In comparison, there were 22 million people in Syria (pre-war) and nearly 100 million in Egypt. Put another way, the Zionist entity’s 8.5 million people are surrounded by 427 million Muslims. This means the Zionist entity is unable to field a large army compared to others in the region, due to its small population, so it must rely on its reserves. This small population size also increases its sensitivity to civilian and military losses. Losing just one war could mean the end of the country. Thus ever since 1948, this fragile entity has faced an existential threat of survival from the surrounding states as well as non-state actors. The basic challenge for the Zionist entity is that its security requirements outstrip its military capabilities, making it continuously and permanently dependent on an outside power.

The challenge this creates for the Zionist entity was outlined by George Friedman from Stratfor: “The center of gravity of “Israel’s” strategic challenge was always Egypt. The largest Arab country, with about 80 million people, Egypt could field the most substantial army. More to the point, Egypt could absorb casualties at a far higher rate than “Israel”. The danger that the Egyptian army posed was that it could close with the “Israelis” and engage in extended, high-intensity combat that would break the back of “Israel” Defense Forces by imposing a rate of attrition that “Israel” could not sustain. If “Israel” were to be simultaneously engaged with Syria, dividing its forces and its logistical capabilities, it could run out of troops long before Egypt, even if Egypt were absorbing far more casualties.”[2]

Being a small country with little flexibility in the use of land as a buffer zone, a limited capacity to take large numbers of military or civilian casualties, and economic and social constraints, a quick end to any major war is essential for the Zionists and this has dominated its military doctrine. On its inception, the Zionists faced the threat of extinction at the hands of massed Arab armies, that if working in concert, would overwhelm it in an invasion. This is why the Zionists military doctrine has always been to maintain what they have and expand to gain as much of the surrounding lands. This meant having a mobile force in conjunction with the air force in undertaking unilateral attacks.

This led to the birth of the entity’s offensive approach, with a posture that called for transferring the fight to enemy territory, delivering pre-emptive strikes, attaining a quick victory by concentrating the offensive on a single front while defending other fronts, and enhancing the ability to rapidly shift the main effort from one front to another. This led to large investment in the air force as its main military firepower. In 1953, Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion laid this out: “Dominance in the air, more than any other factor, will ensure us victory, and vice versa.”[3] The entity’s air force remains today its most advanced military arm.

With a possible war with multiple Arab armies, the Zionist entity’s doctrine sought to balance its quantitative weakness with technologically superior arms to its Arab neighbours. Through help from the West, the Zionist entity was able to develop a combat aircraft, navy vessels, ammunition, small arms, missiles and electronics. The Zionist entity was convinced it must maintain a Qualitative Military Edge (QME) over its Arab neighbours — the concept that it must rely on superior equipment and training to compensate for its smaller population and recruitment base relative to the Arab states.
The small population had a knock-on effect on its economy of producing a labour shortage. The Zionist entity only has a labour force of 3.3 million. Economic development and industrial development are labour intensive and dependent on knowledge and skills retention. With such a small labour force the Zionist entity is reliant upon foreign knowledge and expertise.

The Zionist entity’s economy is worth $387 billion, this is just too small to cater for the entity’s population. This impacts how much taxes the government collects as it subsidises the world’s Jews to migrate to the entity to normalise its occupation. As a result, the entity has focused on key industries for its survival. This means many industries such as mining and manufacturing have been neglected. To compensate for this the entity relies on technology, military aid and foreign aid transfers. It also relies on influential Jews across the world, especially in the US to influence foreign policies of these states in favour of it. The Zionist entity has a heavy dependency on the cooperation of other states as self-sufficiency is not an option.

The Zionist entity has a large energy deficit, meaning it will always have to import energy. The entity relies heavily on external imports for meeting most of its energy needs, spending significant amounts from its domestic budget for its transportation sector which relies on gasoline and diesel fuel, while most of its electricity production is generated using imported coal.

Rather than being a military giant, this weak entity has always been vulnerable to its neighbours. However, it received a massive security boost from the 1979 peace treaty with Egypt. The Zionist entity then had a freer hand to focus on non-state actors and felt able to accelerate settlement building, increase expulsions of the Palestinians from their lands and expanding its economic activity.

In the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, the various Palestinian intifadas and the wars with Hezbollah in 2006 and Hamas in Gaza in 2008, Zionist interests were damaged, but its survival was not in question. Neither Hizbullah nor Hamas possess large armoured formations, nor do they have the potential to invade or overrun well-defended Zionist positions.

Today, the Zionist entity’s doctrine is completely geared towards asymmetric warfare. This consists of asymmetric warfare in an urban setting, in which the army deliberately targets civilian infrastructure, as a means of inducing suffering for the civilian population.

Its defence industry has been constructed to deal with its precarious situation. As it has an extremely small population, too small for the government to collect sufficient taxes to fund a large industrial base. This means investment in major military platforms is prohibitively expensive because of the huge investment required to keep a leading position in those areas. The Zionist entity is also limited in purchasing platforms from abroad, due to costs, even though it has consistently found foreign patrons to its cause, politicians from its inception have found that defence sales have come with strings attached.
The Zionist entity faces a precarious military reality, which no amount of military development can change. Despite receiving significant US funds and military equipment it has failed to change the fact that it is outnumbered and surrounded. Armed militias have been able to expose the Zionist’s weakness on numerous occasions – even as the surrounding lands have large conventional armies sitting on the sidelines as spectators. The Zionists’ attempts at developing indigenous platforms have failed on most occasions as it lacks the economy to sustain such large projects. This is why it has come to rely on US handouts.

The Zionists entity’s aggressive military posture is really a public relations action to deter and confuse those who might wonder why the Arab and Muslim rulers do nothing to liberate Palestine. The rulers themselves are happy to fuel this story of the invincible and dangerous as it justifies their betrayal, cowardice and inaction. The Zionist entity lacks the strategic depth for a long intensity battle and aside from its air force has little power projection capabilities. The Zionist’s endless struggle will remain in trying to maintain a qualitative advantage over its neighbours, something its economy does not have the capacity to sustain.


Egypt
Until the 1967 war with the Zionist entity, Egypt’s military doctrine was centred on securing Egypt’s key territories. Army formations were divided into four regional commands – the Suez, Sinai, Nile Delta, and Nile Valley up to Sudan. The remainder of Egypt’s territory, over 75%, was the sole responsibility of the small frontier Corps. Internal control was the priority for Nasser, leaving the coastal defence to a small frontier force. After the 1967 humiliation, the army was reorganised, and a reorientation took place in Egypt’s military posture. Two further field armies were organised from the existing ground forces – the Second Army and the Third Army, both of which were stationed in the eastern part of the country.


The Egyptian war doctrine, derived from Britain, was not suited to the battle problem the Zionist entity posed. In 1967, the Zionist entity was considered to have won its most complete victory over Egypt, as well as Jordan and Syria.
After the 1967 war and throughout the 1970’s Soviet arms flowed into Egypt which also led to the restructuring of the Egyptian army which for decades had been designed almost wholly for controlling the population, not facing the enemies of the Ummah. The new military posture led to the shock invasion of the Zionist entity in the 1973 war, where the Zionists were caught completely off guard. While ground forces and senior officers wanted to press their advantage in a winning position, Anwar Sadat was only interested in finding a way to pursue peace negotiations and thus failed to push home the advantage gained from the territories recaptured. In 1979 the Zionist-Egypt peace deal was signed, which normalised relations between the two countries, eventually leading to the Zionists to withdrawal from the Sinai, leaving it as a demilitarized zone.

The Egyptian army has a force of 468,500 active personnel, with reserves of 479,000. It is a land-centric army, with the ground forces overwhelmingly dominating the whole force. The army formations consist of 3 field army units spread over 9 military bases consisting of armour, artillery and mechanized units.

Egypt’s 4,145 tanks are composed of 1,130 tanks are the US M1 Abrams tank. These have undergone several upgrades, including, new engines, extensive armour addition, armoured side skirts, fire control system with ballistics computers, infrared vision device, laser rangefinder and upgraded gun stabiliser. Egypt has produced the M1 Abrams tank on licence from the US.

The large size of Egypt’s ground forces has always concerned many western policymakers. It is considered massively disproportionate. Shana Marshall of the Institute of Middle East Studies at George Washington University highlighted: “There’s no conceivable scenario in which they’d need all those tanks short of an alien invasion.”[4]
Egypt’s combat aircrafts are dominated by 240 US F-16s, and 76 French Mirages. In 1962 Egypt undertook a major program with the help of West German technicians to design and build a supersonic jet fighter, but the government terminated the project because of financial strains caused by the 1967 Six-day war.

Egypt’s forces are considered the strongest when measured relatively to the nations of Africa and the Middle East. The Egyptian military on its own is considered the tenth strongest in the world according to some estimates, and if used for offensive purposes it would be a force to be reckoned with. Today, however, the immense potential of the armed forces is shackled to a blinkered leadership under Sisi and his cronies, which has no vision, ambition or principles, let alone the capacity to understand how the Muslim lands could be liberated and transformed by the system of Islam.


Turkey
Turkey’s military doctrine for long was structured to meet the enemy at its border and fight a structured retreat from the frontier. This picture did not change until the early 1990s. Until then the Turkish military ranked Russia, Greece, Iraq, Iran, and Syria as the top threats to security based on their perceived claims on Turkish territory and ability to project conventional forces. Until the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact in 1990, the Turkish Army had a static defence mission of countering any possible attack on Thrace by Soviet and Warsaw Pact forces and any attack from the Soviet Transcaucasus Military District on the Caucasus frontier.

With the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, this lead to a rethink within the army regarding its posture and the capability of the armed forces. Turkey lacked an indigenous defence industry and was still using outdated equipment. Military planners envisioned a land force anchored by heavy armour and mechanized infantry that could move quickly by road or across open country with organic air defence. In place of static defence relying on overwhelming numbers of older weapon systems, Turkish officers decided to create a highly mobile manoeuvre force. The air force and navy were to play a secondary and supporting role in this military strategy. The new doctrine also introduced Turkey’s military modernisation programme, which is now into its second decade where Turkey gradually moves to developing indigenous military platforms.

The Turkish armed forces consist of over 1 million personnel, including 378,000 reservists. The Armed forces consist of the Army, the Navy (including naval aviation and naval infantry) and the Air Force. The Gendarmerie and the Coast Guard, both have law enforcement and military functions. Turkey’s ground force of 402,000 personnel, is the largest portion of the armed forces.

Military planners have made significant strides in their National Tank Production Project (M?TÜP – Milli Tank Üretimi Projesi), an initiative developed in mid-1990’s to establish production, development and maintenance of main battle tanks. The project was initiated with an agreement signed between Otokar and Undersecretariat for Defense Industries in 2007, worth approximately $500 million in order to design, develop and produce 4 prototypes of the Main Battle Tank, using only Turkish resources. Otokar produced its first prototype in 2009 and from 3 July to 10 July 2013 the ‘Altay’ completed testing. Over the next decade, Turkey’s 3000 (approx) tanks will be replaced by the indigenously built third generation Altay.

Turkey’s air force consists of modern combat fighters dominated by the F-16, supplemented by 152 F-4 Phantoms. The Turkish air force trains intensively with US and NATO instructors on F-16 operations. It is now competent enough to train other air forces, such as those of Chile and the UAE, in those same F-16 operations. Turkey continues to assemble F-16s under licence, it, however, has plans for the Turkish Aerospace Industries (TAI) to reduce dependence on US-produced fighter jets. In 2010 SSM provided TAI with $20 million, to design a new fighter aircraft, which TAI might then develop and produce in partnership with a foreign company by 2020.

In 2010, Turkish Aerospace Industries (TAI) presented the first medium-altitude long-endurance (MALE) unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) produced by a Turkish company. It is likely to be acquired not only by the Turkish Air Force but also by the Army and Navy, which altogether currently employ more than 200 MALE and Mini-UAVs.

Turkey’s most ambitious and most expensive development program, the TFX is a Fifth-Generation stealth Fighter, expected to begin its test flights in 2023 the TFX is a next-generation fighter program in cooperation with Sweden’s Saab and designed to replace Turkey’s fleet of F-16C/Ds starting in the 2020s.

Turkey currently has around 111 commissioned ships in the navy (excluding minor auxiliary vessels). This makes Turkey navy the most powerful fleet in the Middle East and North Africa.

Turkey’s armed forces are dominated by a land-centric structure, which gives it significant offensive capabilities. It is not now transitioning to a more mobile force and moving away from static structures. In line with its regional role, its army will only grow in capabilities. Turkey possesses immense resources, which must be directed towards the Ummah’s enemies, and tackling the security crises and occupied regions of the Islamic lands. Instead of this vaunted and noble role, the Turkish military under the leadership of Erdogan is carrying out the dirty work of the US administration, aggravating the region’s instability instead of ending it.


Iran
The basis of Iran’s current military doctrine was developed during the long Iran-Iraq war (1980-1988). Concepts such as self-reliance, holy defence and export of the revolution first entered the military lexicon during the Iran-Iraq War and were codified as doctrine in the early 1990s. These ideas mingled with concepts from pre-revolutionary doctrine, which was heavily influenced by the US, to form a unique hybrid that distinguished modern Iranian military doctrine from its largely Soviet-inspired counterparts in the Arab world.

With an effective embargo on military sales, Iran’s armed forces were tailored with war-fighting strategies to counter technologically superior adversaries. Tacitly acknowledging it has little chance of winning a conventional force-on-force conflict, Iran opted for a deterrence-based model of attrition warfare that raises an opponent’s risks and costs, rather than reducing its own. Iran compensated for its inability to modernise its conventional forces, delays in its military production efforts, and limits on its arms by building up different kinds of military force.

Central to this has been the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), which comprises around 125,000 men. Being a small force and not restricted to conventional army formations, the IRGC is Iran’s main weapon in its region. Its importance can also be seen from the fact the IRGC air force operates Iran’s ballistic missile forces. Iran’s military strategy rests on a number of assumptions, it assumes state-on-state warfare is an impossibility, which is the Achilles heel of any asymmetric strategy. Due to this strategy, Iran has neglected and struggled to modernise its conventional forces. The costs involved are too high for Iran’s economy and budget to bear and as a result, investment has all been in its asymmetric capabilities.

Iran is reliant upon its missiles and irregular forces to provide defence from any foreign threat. Its conventional forces are poorly trained and poorly equipped and it is qualitatively outmatched by its irregular forces. However, having advanced irregular forces does give Iran some useful advantages. With a smaller irregular force, Iran can deploy troops much more quickly as deployments will be smaller and not mechanised. This will give it a significant advantage over any adversary who will have to deploy large forces, with much more heavier equipment, which will delay any intervention.
Irregular forces are also cheaper to maintain as they make use of lighter weapons and technology. Unlike the US army, the Iranian forces do not require complex exercises to maintain readiness. Given that Iranian patrol boats, warships, and submarines are in position to fire their weapons as soon as they get underway from their home ports, the asymmetric maritime warfare model of Iran assumes that any maritime conflict will be fought at close range, without complex interdependent positioning of ships beforehand. Numbers and speed will be of greater importance in this context than advanced training.

Because Iranian maritime strategy does not require long-range deployments or complex, simultaneous ship movements at sea, Iranian naval exercises are focused on exercising basic capabilities, ensuring that if the conventional navy and IRGC navy need to fight, they can execute their short-range, short-duration, and technologically simple asymmetric warfare tactics capably. The conventional navy and IRGC navy are nowhere near as capable at traditional maritime combat as the US Navy, but they do not need to be; they only need to be capable of reliably exercising simple asymmetric tactics.

Iran’s most successful military development has been in the realm of missiles. In 1991 Iran announced the first domestic production of ballistic missiles. Iran’s inability to modernise its airpower has meant its air defence is weak, due to this Iran built up its strategic missile forces as a cost-effective way to compensate for its weaknesses.

The Iranian leadership has stated that it operates several thousand short and medium-range mobile ballistic missiles, including the Shahab-3 with a range of up to 2,100 kilometres. The Iranian military industry started the missile development program in earnest during Iran’s long and costly fratricidal war with Iraq. Throughout the war, Iran found that it could not strike certain Iraqi facilities or targets with its own forces. This resulted in an ambitious missile development programme that is still continuing. Today, Iran is developing space launch vehicles and sophisticated medium-range ballistic missiles. Iran’s ballistic missiles possess the capability to deliver a variety of conventional high explosives in its region and beyond.

The Shahab series of missiles are an indigenous design derived from the basic Scud. Nowadays the Shahab is accurate enough to hit specific large-area targets such as airports or port facilities and has a big enough payload to cause significant damage. There are a number of derivative designs of the Shahab series, including the Qiam 1 and the Ghadr-110, but for all practical purposes, these can be considered part of the Shahab series of missiles. The Shahab-1 and Shahab-2 are essentially updated Scud missiles and are classified as Short Range Ballistic Missiles (SRBM), but the Shahab-3 and Shahab-4 are much more capable versions and represent a significant improvement in range, payload, and accuracy. The Shahab-3 was the first Medium Range Ballistic missiles (MRBM) in the Iranian inventory. The Shahab-4, which is still under development, will have an increased range of 2000 kilometres.

The Sejil series of missiles are a derivative upgrade of the Shahab series of missiles with some important technological improvements. The most consequential feature of the Sejil series of missiles is that they are powered with solid fuel, giving them a significant operational advantage over the standard liquid-fuelled Shahab. Because solid-fuelled missiles are ready-fuelled, they do not need a separate liquid fuelling process. Therefore, solid-fuelled missiles have a much shorter launch cycle than liquid-fuelled missiles. In terms of range, the baseline Sejil is roughly comparable to the Shahab-4 and is classified as a Medium Range Ballistic Missile. In terms of operational effectiveness, it is significantly more lethal, as it has a shorter shoot cycle and is faster, giving missile defences less time to react. The Sejil purportedly incorporates two stages and solid fuel — both of which are significant steps in Iran’s missile program. Iran claims that it has a range of 1,200 km and significantly improved accuracy. In a similar situation to Turkey, despite the anti-Zionist rhetoric of its rulers, the military capacity of Iran is directed at dividing the Ummah and dancing to the tune of the Colonialists, rather than ending the occupation of Palestine.

Saudi Arabia
Saudi Arabia was for long the world’s largest purchaser of global arms and America’s biggest customer. Saudi Arabia has – for the last decade and more – been one of the world’s biggest importers of arms. Whilst Saudi Arabia produces very little military equipment it has used the Ummah’s oil and gas resources to arm itself with the world’s most sophisticated and latest weaponry. Whilst much of this keeps foreign workers employed, Saudi actions globally do not reflect this position.
The current weapons inventory includes the latest battle tanks (the M–1A2 Abrams and 290 AMX–30), over 300 jets including the newly acquired Eurofighter Typhoons and upgraded Tornado IDS, F-15 Eagle and F-15E Strike Eagle fighter planes. It would surprise many to learn that Saudi military strength and technology is a match for many European nations and is superior to the Zionist entity in many areas.

Put within the context of this wealth of military riches, the inability of the Saudi regime to provide any protection to Muslims in recent crises is nothing short of criminal.


Analysis
In conclusion, despite the myths and the rhetoric, the Zionist entity faces many hurdles in surviving in a region where it is completely outnumbered and outgunned. In any serious skirmish, its survival would be in question. In every area where the Zionist entity lacks capabilities, the surrounding nations have an abundance. The biggest advantage the surrounding Muslim armies have large ground forces. In any war to liberate Palestine ground forces will be needed to conduct offensive operations and hold territory and deny it to its adversary. The Egypt military on its own can saturate the theatre of war against the Zionist entity, but in combination with other surrounding nations, the Zionist entity would be completely overstretched. As the battle would be over an area the size of Wales this is a very small area to conquer. Turkey’s navy is more than capable of sealing the Zionist entities ports and the border with the Mediterranean. With Egypt moving its forces in the South and artillery strikes by Turkey form the West, this will be too many fronts for the Zionist entity to handle.

The Zionists have focused on air force in order to project power, but they face a strategic problem in this area, despite possessing some advanced jets. The challenge is that they are outnumbered considerably by the number of jets in the Islamic lands. If it has to face multiple armies then it will struggle to concentrate its forces to overpower or bring any power to bear.

The Zionists have received much help with developing missile defences. But these have never been tested against the missiles of Iran, Turkey or Egypt. In any war, it would not possible for the Zionist entity to deal with so many different targets.

The question for the Muslim armies is not whether they have the capability to deal with the Zionist entity. Rather it is when will they end their shameful inaction while their brothers and sisters face atrocities, expulsion and humiliation at the hands of an enemy who is encouraged by the silence of the treacherous Muslim rulers.
Reply
#38
SAYYED NASRALLAH TO ISRAELIS : 
RETURN TO YOUR HOMELANDS OR GREAT WAR WILL LIBERATE ENTIRE PALESTINE

Mohammad Salami

Hezbollah Secretary General Sayyed Hasan Nasrallah on Friday called on the Israelis to return back to their homelands, adding that if they insist on occupying Palestine, a great war will erupt and liberate all the occupied Palestinian territories.  Delivering a speech during the crowded ceremony held by Hezbollah in the Lebanese southern town of Maroun al-Ras on Al-Quds International Day, Sayyed Nasrallah stressed that Hezbollah has a clear-cut belied that Palestine will be completely liberated and that Al-Quds shrines will be regained by its local.


“We all will pray in Al-Quds on the Day of the Great War.”

Sayyed Nasrallah started his speech by referring to the religious aspects of Imam Khomeini’s announcement of Al-Quds International Day to be marked on the last Friday of the Holy Month of Ramadan every year, stressing that his eminence wanted to let its cause persist in the conscience of the Umma.  Sayyed Nasrallah pointed out that Al-Quds International Day is an occasion for the Umma solidarity with Al-Quds because it is the essence and the symbol of the 70-year conflict and of because of the recent US moves against the holy city (referring to the US decision o recognize Al-Quds as the capital of the Zionist entity and transfer the embassy to it after it had been in Tel Aviv).  “The most dangerous is what has been unveiled recently about the Century’s Deal which aims at eradicating the Palestinian cause and giving up Al-Quds and the sanctities to the usurping entity.”

Sayyed Nasrallah added that Hezbollah chose the border town of Maroun Al-Ras because of its geographical location near the occupied Palestinian territories and its symbolic memory of challenge and victory achieved by the Islamic Resistance fighters against the Israeli enemy in 2006 war.  Hezbollah Secretary General said that Al-Quds Day is being marked more vigorously in the holy city itself where the worshippers performed the prayers of the last Friday in the Holy Month of Ramadan, in Gaza where the fasting protesters gather under the striking sun on its border to clash with the Zionist occupation soldiers, and in various Arab and Islamic cities, including Tehran, Sanaa and others, to announce their support to the Palestinian cause.  After the US recognition of Al-Quds as the capital of the Zionist entity, there is a challenge to prevent the world countries (especially the Arab and the Islamic ones) from supporting the American decision, according to Sayyed Nasrallah who added that “we have considerable capacities to reach this target.”

Sayyed Nasrallah emphasized that the Palestinian locals in Al-Quds also have to encounter the demographic challenge imposed by the Zionist enemy that is attempting to cause major demographic alterations in the occupied Al-Quds by the Zionists who resort to constructing large numbers of settler houses in order to change the identity of the city.
 
The Resistance leader added that the Palestinians further must confront the Zionist threats and moves against Al-Aqsa Mosque, stressing that the locals have a major and vital role in this concern. The Arabs, Muslims and Christians, must preserve their houses, stores and all their means of existence to defeat the Zionist challenges, according to Sayyed Nasrallah who underscored that the Arabs in Al-Quds are confronting the Zionists on behalf of the entire Umma.

Sayyed Nasrallah said that all the Umma must financially help the Palestinians in the occupied Al-Quds in order to enable them to face the Zionist challenges, noting that some treacherous Arab businessmen are purchasing Palestinian houses in the occupied Al-Quds and selling them to the Zionists.  Sayyed Nasrallah pointed out that the Saudi and a number of other countries are presenting a religious theory on the Israelis right to control Al-Quds, adding that they falsify and distort the meaning of the Holy Quranic verses in order to protect their thrones by surrendering to the US orders, recognizing the Zionist entity and eradicating the Palestinian cause.

The US President Donald Trump acknowledged that some Arab regimes will immediately fall if they lose the American protection’ consequently, they will follow all the US instructions, including supporting the Zionist entity, according to Sayyed Nasrallah who added that the enemies are betting on changing the priorities and interests of the new generations. “However, the facts which show that the most of Gaza martyrs are young indicate that the new generations will preserve the Palestinian cause as a priority.”

Sayyed Nasrallah added that the Palestinian people will never give up Al-Quds and the sanctities to the enemy, adding that all their factions are exposed to heavy pressures, yet that their steadfastness is basic in frustrating the Century’s Deal.  Sayyed Nasrallah stressed that all the countries which bow to the US will do not allow their citizens to publicly advocate the Palestinian cause and Al-Quds, adding that they arrest anyone who even tries to do that.  Hezbollah leader highlighted the case of the Yemenis who marked Al-Quds Day in support of the Palestinian cause, despite the Saudi-led war against their impoverished country, stressing that this proves they are pure Arabs, unlike some regimes in the region.

Sayyed Nasrallah also stressed that the Islamic Republic of Iran would not have faced all the US pressures and paid that heavy prices, if it had not been supporting the Palestinian resistance against the Israeli occupation. “Never bet on the Iranians choices because they have sacrificed hundreds of thousands of martyrs for the sake of the Islamic regime which defends the Palestinian cause,” Sayyed Nasrallah addressed the enemies.  Sayyed Nasrallah also highlighted the Iraqi strategic change, referring to the rallies held to mark Al-Quds International Day and stressing that the Iraqi stance have always supported the Palestinian cause.  The axis of resistance in Syria has been able to liberate the largest part of the cities from the terrorist group, according to Sayyed Nasrallah who called on the Israelis to acknowledge their defeat in that country.

“They wanted to dethrone President Bashar Assad. However, now they just aim to eradicate the role of Hezbollah and Iran in Syria.” 
On Hezbollah role in Syria, Sayyed Nasrallah stressed that the Resistance group intervened militarily to defeat the takfiri terror groups upon the Syrian government’s request, adding that whole world can never force the part to withdraw troops from Syria.  “Hezbollah may withdraw troops from Syria only at the request of the Syrian government.”

Every year, the International Quds Day is celebrated on the last Friday of the Islamic holy month of Ramadan. Millions of people across the world throng the streets to mark this day designated by the late founder of the Islamic Republic Imam Khomeini. This year, Quds Day has become a larger rallying cry as it comes after months of mass protests in Gaza which were met with deadly force against unarmed protesters. More than 120 Palestinian protesters were martyred.


TRUMP PURSUES ISRAEL ‘PEACE PLAN’  TO BREAK OFF GAZA WITHOUT INPUT FROM PALESTINIANS
https://therealnews.com/stories/trump-pu...lestinians
While US President Trump reportedly hopes to use Gulf funding to pressure Egypt to take over Gaza, splitting it from the West Bank, expert Phyllis Bennis warns no Israel peace deal is possible when “there is no Palestinian voice” involved


ISRAEL SHUTS VITAL CROSSING BUT GAZANS WILL NOT ‘DIE IN SILENCE’


Israel has intensified its crippling blockade of the Gaza Strip by closing the only crossing for commercial goods. Former Gaza health minister Dr. Basem Naim discusses the impact on a devastated health system and says that Palestinians will continue their weekly protests for freedom

TRUMP’s MASSIVE FUNDING CUT PLUNGES UN PALESTINIAN REFUGEE AGENCY INTO CRISIS 
https://therealnews.com/stories/trumps-m...nto-crisis

UNRWA, the United Nations Palestinian refugee agency, could run out of money for aid programs within weeks, after President Trump drastically cut US funding. Expert Phyllis 
Bennis warns this can lead to a humanitarian catastrophe and make life impossible for many Palestinians
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#39
AN ISRAEL LAW THAT DIVIDES AND DISCRIMINATES 




ISRAEL ADOPTS DIVISIVE JEWISH NATION STATE LAW
https://www.trtworld.com/mea/israel-adop...-law-19005

The Israeli parliament has adopted a controversial bill that defines Israel exclusively as the 'nation state of the Jewish people', excluding the Arab-Israeli minority that makes up twenty percent of the population. Israel passed a law on Thursday to declare that only Jews have the right of self-determination in the country, something members of the Arab minority called racist and verging on apartheid. The "nation-state" law, backed by the right-wing government, passed by a vote of 62-55 and two abstentions in the 120-member parliament after months of political argument. Some Arab lawmakers shouted and ripped up papers after the vote.

"This is a defining moment in the annals of Zionism and the history of the state of Israel," Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told the Knesset after the vote. Largely symbolic, the law was enacted just after the 70th anniversary of the birth of the state of Israel. It stipulates that "Israel is the historic homeland of the Jewish people and they have an exclusive right to national self-determination in it".  The bill also strips Arabic of its designation as an official language alongside Hebrew, downgrading it to a "special status" that enables its continued use within Israeli institutions.   Israel's Arabs number some 1.8 million, about 20 percent of the 9 million population.


The law will also apply to territories occupied in 1967 such as East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights, which were annexed to the territory of the State of Israel by law, but which has not been internationally recognised.  Early drafts of the legislation went further in what critics at home and abroad saw as discrimination towards Israel's Arabs, who have long said they are treated as second-class citizens.  Clauses that were dropped in last-minute political wrangling - and after objections by Israel's president and attorney-general - would have enshrined in law the establishment of Jewish-only communities, and instructed courts to rule according to Jewish ritual law when there were no relevant legal precedents.


Instead, a more vaguely-worded version was approved, which says: "The state views the development of Jewish settlement as a national value and will act to encourage and promote its establishment."   Even after the changes, critics said the new law will deepen a sense of alienation within the Arab minority.  "I announce with shock and sorrow the death of democracy," Ahmed Tibi, an Arab lawmaker, told reporters.


"Ensure our state's Jewish character"

Netanyahu has defended the law. "We will keep ensuring civil rights in Israel's democracy but the majority also has rights and the majority decides," he said last week.  "An absolute majority wants to ensure our state's Jewish character for generations to come."   Hassan Jabareen, the director general of Adalah, the Legal Center for Minority Rights in Israel, said that the law had key elements of apartheid, which is prohibited under international law.

He said: "The new law constitutionally enshrines the identity of Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people only – despite the 1.5 million Palestinian citizens of the state and residents of East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights – and guarantees the exclusive ethnic-religious character of Israel as Jewish."



Entrenching discrimination

"By defining sovereignty and democratic self-rule as belonging solely to the Jewish people Israel has made discrimination a constitutional value and has professed its commitment to favoring Jewish supremacy as the bedrock of its institutions,” he said.  Israel's Arab population is comprised mainly of descendants of the Palestinians who remained on their land during the conflict between Arabs and Jews that culminated in the war of 1948 surrounding the creation of the modern state of Israel. Hundreds of thousands were forced to leave their homes or fled.

Those who remained have full equal rights under the law but say they face constant discrimination, citing inferior services and unfair allocations for education, health and housing. 

In Ma'alot-Tarshiha, a municipality in northern Israel which was created by linking the Jewish town of Ma'alot and the Arab town of Tarshiha, there was anger among Arab residents. “I think this is racist legislation by a radical right-wing government that is creating radical laws, and is planting the seeds to create an apartheid state," said physician Bassam Bisharah, 71.   "The purpose of this law is discrimination. They want to get rid of the Arabs totally," said Yousef Faraj, 53, from the nearby Druze village of Yanuh. "The Israelis want to destroy all the religions of the Arabs."   Adalah, the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, called the law a bid to advance "ethnic superiority by promoting racist policies".

KNESSET PASSES NATION STATE LAW CODIFYING ISRAEL AS AN APARTHEID STATE 

Knesset member Oren Hazan takes a selfie with Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu after a Knesset session that passed the 'nation-state' bill in Jerusalem on July 19 [AP Photo/Olivier Fitoussi]
  • In Palestine, we are dealing with a complex situation: We have a settler-colonial project that denies its colonialism and argues it is a democracy and we have its victims whose victimisation has been dismissed for decades and whose national liberation struggle has been defamed.  The colonisers have been successful in manipulating the narrative on what is going on, rewriting history and whitewashing their crimes. Various countries around the world have bought into their lies and kept a "neutral" stance, claiming their positions are "balanced".
What is there to balance, when one side has one of the most advanced armies in the world, financed and supplied by an allied superpower, and the other side has been altogether abandoned by allies and well-wishers and has only the determination and strength of its people to rely on?  


But these claims of "neutrality" and "balance" are no longer tenable. Israel has stopped playing the democracy pretence game and has revealed itself for what it really is: an apartheid state. On July 19, the Israeli Knesset voted to pass the so-called "nation-state law" which declares Israel "the national home of the Jewish people". It is now officially an exclusive ethno-religious state.

Unveiling the ethno-religious state of Israel
For us Palestinians, this law reiterates the obvious: namely, that the Zionist ideology is inherently racist and undemocratic. The political goal of Zionism was to engineer a demographic shift in Palestine, making the minority Jewish population (which was just 7.6 percent in 1914) a majority through massive Jewish immigration and settlement building and expulsion of the Palestinians.



Inevitably, the expropriation of land went hand-in-hand with the violation of rights of the Palestinian majority. Zionists have always looked at Palestinians as invisible if not absent, or rather "present absentees". The identity of those who remained within the boundaries of what was to become Israel was erased through the term "Israeli Arab" and their rights curbed by a myriad of laws ("the nation-state law" being just the latest iteration).  This is because, contrary to modern liberal thinking, in Israel, citizenship and nationality are two separate, independent concepts. In other words, Israel is not the state of its citizens, but the state of the Jewish people. Thus Palestinians in Israel have Israeli passports but they do not have rights equal to those of Jewish citizens.


With the new "nation-state law", Palestinians in Israel are now considered "native aliens" or foreigners in their own homeland, because Israel is defined by its law as " the historical homeland of the Jewish people" i.e. not the state of all of its citizens. This is the direct result of Zionism and its ideology of racism. It is also the direct result of prevailing undemocratic sentiments among Israel's Jews. The contradiction between professed ideals and actual behaviour, which has been the engine of political change in many places around the world, does not exist in Israel because the democratic creed, or civic democracy, is absent in Israeli society.

There is no promise of equality for all citizens in Israeli political culture and praxis. And there is no tradition of civil liberties in Israel because such a tradition is incompatible with Zionism. Hence, one can understand the antagonism of the establishment to calls for the creation of one state for Palestinians and Jews, one secular democratic state run by parliamentary elections and majority rule in historical Palestine. This idea has been rejected outright by Israeli Jewish society because it would effectively mean the end of Zionism.

And as Israel effectively turns into an exclusive ethno-religious state, we have to ask uncomfortable questions: does this mean that Islam, Christianity, Hinduism, etc can also be the basis of modern states? And if we still insist that religion should be separate from state, then where is the international outrage? Why isn't mainstream media obsessing about the Jewish state, the way it was about the "Islamic state"? How is Israel different from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant that sought to establish a state for Muslims only through violence and dispossession?

The fight against apartheid is on the passing of the "nation-state law" should eliminate whatever doubt there still is among "neutral" observers that Israel is, in fact, an apartheid state.  Just as apartheid South Africa gave citizenship to white South Africans and relegated blacks to "independent homelands", Zionism gives all Jews the right to citizenship in the state of Israel, while denying citizenship to Palestinians - its indigenous inhabitants.

While South Africa's apartheid used race to determine citizenship, the state of Israel uses religious identification to determine citizenship. Just as apartheid South Africa made laws criminalising free movement of blacks on their ancestral land, Israel controls every aspect of Palestinians' lives through a military occupation infrastructure composed of checkpoints, Jewish-only settlements and roads, and the Wall, combined with a web of legal regulations.  The parallels between Israel and apartheid South Africa are infinite. And probably the only major difference between the two is that Israel gets away with its crimes with unprecedented impunity, as evidenced by its latest war crimes in Gaza. 

So what is left for the Palestinian people after the approval of this blatantly racist bill?  Well, we definitely are not foolish enough to expect anything from the so-called "international community".  Years of "negotiations" created only bantustans in the West Bank and a concentration camp in Gaza. Palestinians are still at the receiving end of merciless assaults by racist Israeli troops hidden in their US-made helicopters and F16's.  What all US envoys to the region have been trying to do is reach a "solution" in accordance with Israeli conditions, disregarding Security Council resolutions and international law. Neither the current US right-wing administration nor the spineless EU has a fair plan for how to resolve the crisis in Palestine.

The only thing that we, Palestinians, can count on is the power of people, just as South Africans did when, through a sustained global campaign, they forced governments to boycott their apartheid regime.  We will continue to expand the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement and will continue marching to the fence in Gaza until we bring this madness to an end. We will also continue working on an alternative model, both democratic and secular, which guarantees equality and abolishes apartheid, bantustans and separation in Palestine altogether. We will not give up the fight.


KNESSET PASSES NATION STATE LAW CODIFYING ISRAEL AS AN APARTHEID STATE  
Miko Peled
https://www.mintpressnews.com/knesset-pa...ate/246100

After several days of rushing and intense debates, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had his wish come true. He urgently wanted to get the Nation State bill passed into law before the Knesset goes into summer recess on July 22, and for several days now the Knesset committee charged with ironing out the bill was delaying the process with long discussions.  Now the law passed 62 to 55 and 2 abstentions. In an almost symbolic act of racism, the Palestinian members of the Knesset were kicked out of the chamber following the vote because of their vocal protests. An usher removes Israeli Arab Knesset member Jamal Zahalka for protesting the passage of the Nation State bill in the Knesset, July 19, 2018. Olivier Fitoussi | AP

Now, with the haggling and the opposition members’ delay tactics over, the final version of the bill has been approved by the Knesset. 
This law has been discussed for several years now; it has evolved, however, and has become extreme to a degree that even right-wing politicians like Benny Begin, the son of former Prime Minister Menachem Begin, and former Likud Defense Minister Moshe Arens, who originally supported the bill, now oppose it.
 
No more Jewish and democratic
In Israel’s 1948  Declaration of Independence on which my own grandfather is signed, the word “democracy” is not mentioned. However, it says that Israel “will foster the development of the country for the benefit of all its inhabitants.” Furthermore, it states that the newly established Jewish State will, “be based on freedom, justice and peace. It will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex” .  
These promises were never fulfilled and Israel enacted laws and policies that favored the mostly immigrant Jewish population at the expense of the native Palestinians. The original version of the Nation State Bill read: 
"The purpose of this Basic Law is to secure the character of Israel as the National State of the Jewish People in order to codify in a basic law the values of Israel as a Jewish democratic state.”

In the new version that was accepted by the committee today, the word “democratic” has been eliminated — arguably so that so-called Zionist values could take precedence over democratic values where the two may collide, particularly over issues pertaining to the Palestinian people. The Nation State law codifies what have been racist policies and practices by Israel into law, and not just a regular law but a Basic Law that defines the State. Dr. Yusef Jabarin, member of the Israeli Knesset for the Joint Arab List wrote to me that even though some elements of this law already exist within Israeli law, codifying it as a Basic Law gives the discrimination constitutional standing, which means it will be harder to challenge the racist policies in the courts.

For example, since the State of Israel was established in 1948, over a thousand Jewish towns have been established throughout the country. At the same time, not only were close to 500 Palestinian towns and villages destroyed but in the last seven decades, not a single town has been established for the Palestinian citizens of the state, even though this community grew from a population of around 150,000 to close to 2 million within that same time frame.

A Bedouin woman sits on the demolished remnants of her home in the village of Umm al-Hiran in Southern Israel, Jan. 18, 2017. Tsafrir Abayov | AP
Palestinians are not welcome in Jewish towns and in many cases would prefer to remain within their communities. Still, for seven decades the State of Israel expropriated enormous tracts of land from Palestinian towns that were not destroyed. These lands were taken in order to build towns and communities, but almost exclusively for the Jewish citizens of the state. Some Jewish towns have instituted “acceptance committees” in order to make sure that no Arabs are permitted to reside in them, and the legality of these committees has been brought to question in the courts. This bill puts the issue to rest by giving a quasi-constitutional stamp of approval to these committees. It is interesting to note that the original version of the bill said:   

"The State may allow a community, including followers of a single religion or members of a single nationality, to establish a separate communal settlement.”
In other words, followers of any religion on nationality were given this right. That language was scrapped and replaced with the following:
"The state sees developing Jewish communities as a national value and will act to encourage, promote and establish them.”
Clearly, they went from allowing segregated communities to encouraging, promoting and establishing segregated communities for Jewish citizens only.
According to a piece by Dr. Yousef Jabareen (not the member of Knesset) in the Israeli daily Haaretz, the new Basic Law only codifies a reality of racial discrimination towards the Palestinian citizens of Israel that is already prevalent. Jabareen, a professor in Israel’s Technion in Haifa, describes the findings of his research on this issue as follows:
In 940 Israeli towns that were studied and which sit on 82 percent of Israel, there is not a single Palestinian family and not a single Palestinian owns a home in any of these towns.”   Furthermore, Jabareen writes, many of these towns have committees that are responsible for accepting or denying citizens seeking to live within them, thus preventing Palestinian citizens of Israel from moving in. The state of Israel is the sole owner of 93 percent of the land, and Israeli law prevents it from selling or leasing to non-Jews. Arabs citizens of the state, who are the native citizens of the land and make up over 20 percent of the citizens, or close to 2 million people, own 2.1 percent of the land.
 
The Arabic language
In 1922, when the League of Nations handed over Palestine to the British Government as a Mandate, it stated specifically in Article 22:
"English, Arabic and Hebrew shall be the official languages of Palestine. Any statement or inscription in Arabic on stamps or money in Palestine shall be repeated in Hebrew and any statement or inscription in Hebrew shall be repeated in Arabic.”

An Israeli Arab teacher from the Arab town of Kabul gives an Arabic class to Israeli schoolchildren in a school in the Jewish village of Yokneam, Dec 20, 2011. Oded Balilty | AP

This has been the law of the land since that day. The status of Arabic began eroding once the State of Israel was established and state institutions almost completely disregarded Arabic so that Hebrew became the dominant language. Still, Arabic retained its legal status as an official language and is spoken within the Palestinian towns where, unlike the Jewish citizens of the state, the residents speak both Arabic and Hebrew. The Nation State bill demotes the status of the Arabic language and states:
"Hebrew is the language of the country. The Arabic language has special status in the country. Its speakers have the right of [Arabic] language access to the services of the state.”   This will erode the Arabic language even more and because this is now within a Basic Law, there will be little or no legal recourse for the Arabic speaking community seeking to challenge it.
 
Expansion by decree
The parts of the law mentioned above are only the more controversial within the bill, but its entire essence is a dangerous attempt to give constitutional status to the erasure of all Arab and Palestinian characteristics from a country that until 70 years ago was known as Palestine and that, in the minds and hearts of millions around the world, remains Palestine. The right to exercise national self-determination in the State of Israel is unique to the Jewish people.”
One has to wonder what Palestinians who have lived on this land for centuries, not to say millennia, must think when they read that they have no right to exercise self-determination on that land. What the bill does not show is that in the minds of its authors and supporters, the boundaries of the State of Israel are not the UN-sanctioned 1947 boundaries and not the pre-1967 boundaries. The Israeli government and all members of the coalition, and indeed many members of the opposition see the boundaries of the State as all of historic Palestine, from the River Jordan to the Mediterranean Sea. The bill gives no answer as to the status and rights of the Palestinians who are not citizens of Israel.
 
Jerusalem
The Nation State bill claims that the entire unified Jerusalem is the capital of Israel. This is once again giving constitutional status to what is a violation of UN resolution 181 and international law, which call for the city to be an entity on its own and not part of any state. The status of the Palestinians in the city is tenuous and precarious. In 1948 every Palestinian was forced to leave West Jerusalem and since 1967 there is a campaign of forced exile that is gaining momentum by the day. This law will no doubt make things even more difficult as the state expropriates land, homes, and neighborhoods from the Palestinians to build for Jews.
 
Uniting the Diaspora
“Israel will be open to Jewish immigration and uniting the diaspora.”
Israeli soldiers and relatives of new Jewish immigrants from the U.S. and Canada, wave flags to welcome them as they arrive at Ben Gurion airport near Tel Aviv, July 23, 2013. Ariel Schalit | AP

This must be seen within the context of the Palestinian demand to execute their right to return to their land and their homes. It is made clear here that the state will be open to Jewish immigration only, which was the practice and now is codified in Basic Law. One may argue that the State of Israel has once again made the case in support of the call to impose boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) on the State of Israel. In a matter of a few short weeks, Israel has bombed Gaza, destroyed the small village of Khan Al-Ahmar, and has now passed a law that makes it an official apartheid state.  Jewish settlers march during a demonstration against a proposed decision to evacuate the Jewish-only West Bank colony of Beit El near Ramallah. Ariel Schalit | AP

Miko Peled is an author and human rights activist born in Jerusalem. He is the author of “The General’s Son. Journey of an Israeli in Palestine,” and “Injustice, the Story of the Holy Land Foundation Five.”


'APARTHEID, FORMALISED' : PALESTINIANS TO FIGHT JEWISH STATE LAW 



Palestinian legislators in Israel prepare to launch series of events in protest of 'racist' nation-state bill.

Farah Najjar

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/07/f...54975.html



Palestinian citizens of Israel are planning a series of actions, including a general strike and international campaigning, in a bid to cancel a controversial lawthat defines the country exclusively as "the nation-state of the Jewish people". Palestinian members of the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, described the legislation's adoption on July 19 as an effort to sabotage the Palestinian "story and narrative". "It's an attempt at destroying the entire rhetoric of historic Palestine … it stands against an entire people," MK Ahmad Tibi, told Al Jazeera.


The Basic Law, which has standing similar to a constitution, gives only Jews the right to self-determination. It also strips Arabic of its official language designation, downgrading it to a "special status" that enables its continued use within Israeli institutions. Additionally, it allows the Israeli government to expand the state's annexation of Palestinian lands in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem. The law considers the expansion of the Jewish-only settlements a national value, encouraging and promoting their construction.


Adopted with 62 votes for and 55 against, the law has been met with widespread condemnation. Critics compare it to apartheid, saying it promotes ethnic superiority and further marginalises some 1.8 million Palestinians with Israeli citizenship and other smaller minorities.


"We now expect to see a storm of legal proposals that are racist in nature," MK Aida-Touma Suleiman told Al Jazeera. "We must be ready to face them and fight them in parliament and on the public level as well".


'Battle of fate'
Since the law's adoption, the High Follow-up Committee - a representative body for the Palestinian citizens of Israel - has been meeting to discuss a way to respond.  The various political factions within the committee have unanimously agreed to launch a series of counter-actions.

INSIDE STORY: An Israel law that divides and discriminates (24:01)
The first is scheduled for August 8 when Palestinians from various cities will attempt to block the main street where the Knesset building lies in Jerusalem during an extraordinary session called for by the Joint List, an alliance of four predominantly Arab parties in the Israeli parliament.


The committee will also soon announce the "national day of anti-apartheid", Tibi said. A petition to cancel the law will be distributed soon, with the aim of garnering at least 500,000 signatures. A general strike is also on the works."The aim is to portray the impact of the day-to-day contributions," said Tibi.  "We're also considering the possibility of reading out our speeches in Arabic during upcoming parliamentary sessions, in protest of the revocation of the status of Arabic as an official language," he said.  Organisers said the moves are meant to help escalate the "struggle" to a national, political and international level - not just in parliament.



"The Knesset to us has never been a place of privilege. It has served merely as one of the various spaces where we battle, struggle and strife," Suleiman said.
"It's going to be a long battle but it's not impossible … it is a battle of fate," she said, describing the difficult path towards scrapping the law.  Apart from campaigning locally, the legislators have so far pencilled in a meeting with European Union officials in Brussels and also plan on working with various United Nations bodies and the global organisation of national parliaments.


'Never democratic'
Earlier this week, Zouheir Bahloul of the Labour Party resigned in protest against the law, bringing the number of Palestinian MKs down to 17, out of a total of 120. His party, which is part of the Zionist Union list and alliance, voted in favour of the legislation. "The law oppresses me and oppresses the population that sent me to the Knesset,'' Bahloul said.

"The government submits the Knesset to its whims. The Knesset has become a rubber stamp of exceptional and racist legislation. I will run from it as one runs from raging fire," he added.  For Suleiman and Tibi, whose parties are members of the Joint List, Bahloul's resignation was inevitable.  "There are Zionist parties with Arab MKs that voted in favour of the bill - that is the danger of joining a Zionist camp; it should never be the case," Tibi said. Palestinian citizens of Israel make up about 20 percent of the country's population.  According to Tibi, they have long been treated as inferior to Jewish citizens - and the new law will make this even easier.


"Israel was never democratic to begin with," he said. "It was racist in its policies, actions and laws. What's new is that this law is a Basic Law."  When Israel defined itself as "Jewish and democratic" in 1958, the "Jewish nature" of the state had always been a point that Palestinians adamantly opposed, added Tibi.  But the law took it a step further. "It is the definition of apartheid," he said.   "We want to say to the international community that there is a Basic Law that institutionalises apartheid and we demand steps to be taken."


With hopes to attain a new vote in parliament, a motion to either scrap it entirely or reformulate its language requires at least 61 votes.  In conjunction, Palestinian MKs plan to appeal to Israel's top court, Suleiman and Tibi confirmed.


'Apartheid, formalised'
However, experts say neither a Supreme Court ruling nor a call to the international community is going to change the reality on the ground for Palestinians.  Diana Buttu, a lawyer and policy adviser at Al-Shabaka: The Palestinian Policy Network, said the EU and the UN can only issue condemnations, but that would be the "extent of it" owing to the US' Security Council veto.


Since coming to office, US President Donald Trump has been developing an even warmer relationship with Israel than previous  US presidents. From 

recognising Jerusalem as Israel's capital amid talks of the "deal of the century", the passing of the law seemed to come at an optimal timing, said Buttu, echoing Suleiman's and Tibi's views. Buttu also noted the Israeli Supreme Court has a history of siding with the "Jewish" component when ruling in cases brought forward by Palestinians against the state.


"In the past, they have [Israeli courts] confronted this fundamental tension by always favouring the side of Jewish and not the side of democracy," Buttu told Al Jazeera, citing the admissions committee law passed seven years ago, which permits smaller Jewish communities to market state lands and determine prerequisites for residency.

WATCH: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLqYJCzTVuE


Trump's 'ultimate deal' for Middle East peace overseen by Kushner (2:27)

In almost half of the Israeli towns, residential admission committees have therefore continued to filter out Palestinian applicants on the grounds of "incompatibility with the social and cultural fabric".  "This law is among at least 50 other discriminatory laws … And in the rulings has always fallen on the side of Jewish, rather than on the side of being democratic," Buttu said. With the recently enacted nation-state bill, Buttu said to issue similar rulings from now on will only become "that much easier".  "Now clearly, they're saying: apartheid, formalised," she said. "This [law] was only to make it official."   Buttu attributes the passing of the bill to the Supreme Court's precedents and its previous rulings.  



"The entire reason that this bill has been allowed to progress so far is because the Israeli Supreme Court has allowed Israel to be as racist as it wants to be," she said.  Despite the challenges, Palestinian MKs remain adamant to find a way to either cancel the legislation or change its language. "Our story is stronger than their law," Tibi said.







ISRAEL's 'NATION-STATE LAW' PARALLELS THE NAZI NUREMBERG LAWS

Israel's new 'nation-state' law follows in the footsteps of Jim Crow, the Indian Removal Act and the Nuremberg Laws


https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinio...39536.html


More than 80 years after Nazi Germany enacted what came to be known as the Nuremberg Race Laws, Israeli legislators voted in favour of the so-called nation-state law. By doing so, they essentially codified "Jewish supremacy" into law, which effectively mirrors the Nazi-era legislation of ethnoreligious stratification of German citizenry. Israel's "nation-state law" stipulates in its first clause that "actualisation of the right of national self-determination in the state of Israel is unique to the Jewish people". In other words, the 1.7 million Palestinian citizens of Israel, the native inhabitants who managed to remain in their homes whenEuropean Jews conquered parts of historical Palestine in 1948, shall be without sovereignty or agency, forever living at the mercy of Israeli Jews. 
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AHED TAMIMI’s BRAVERY EXPOSES ISRAELI, US COWARDICE 
July 30, 2018

Palestinian teenager Ahed Tamimi is free after eight months in an Israeli prison. While her bravery in confronting occupying Israeli soldiers has been celebrated around the world, Western media outlets have gone to great lengths to portray her as an aggressor. We speak to Ali Abunimah of the Electronic Intifada



STATE OF TERROR 

HOW TERRORISM CREATED MODERN ISRAEL


Thomas Suárez






Arabic edition now in print ...
... translated by Dr. Mohammed Asfour, a Jordanian academic, researcher, translator, critic, and poet, who was born in Haifa in 1940.



Why has the Israel-Palestine ‘conflict’ endured for so long, with no resolution in sight?

In this meticulously researched book, Thomas Suárez demonstrates that its cause is not the commonly depicted clash between two ethnic groups — Arabs and Jews — but the violent takeover of Palestine by Zionism, a European settler movement hailing from the era of ethnic nationalism.

Tapping a trove of declassified British documents, much of which has never before been published, the book details a shocking campaign of Zionist terrorism in 1940s and 1950s Palestine that targeted anyone who challenged its messianic settler goals, whether the British government, the indigenous Palestinians, or Jews.

Today's seemingly intractable quagmire is that terror campaign’s unfinished business, an Israeli state driven by unrequited territorial designs and the dream of ethnic ‘purity’. The role of Zionist terrorism in establishing the Israeli state and perpetuating today's conflict is laid bare in Suárez’s groundbreaking narrating of the unbroken historical record.




Reviews

Mondoweiss
"This book is true, and it is important. It proves beyond doubt that Israel is not the perpetual victim of Arab violence that it claims to be, but has been the aggressor throughout the history of the conflict."
Read full review by Dr. David Gerald Fincham

Electronic Intifada
"Suárez offers a penetrating analysis of the roots of Zionist ideology, showing not only its racist underpinnings and colonialist attitudes toward Arabs but also its attempt to exercise political, religious and cultural hegemony over the Jewish people. In a sense Suárez exposes political Zionism as a form of anti-Semitism and a kind of totalitarianism."
Read full review by Rod Such

Tribune Magazine
"[This is] a book that really does get to the heart of the Zionist soul - a very dark place indeed. State Of Terror is not a polemic but a chronological account of the cynical, often indiscriminate violence that enabled a single ‘race’ to colonise and conquer another people’s land within the space of 60 years, and (though the book does not deal, except in a brief epilogue, with the post-Suez period) to continue its campaign of ethnic cleansing for the next 60 or more, slowly gathering to its bosom more and more of the land the Zionists always claimed was theirs by right."
Read full review by Mike Parker (16 December, 2016, p25)

Publishers Weekly
"Suárez passionately and meticulously exposes the terrorism committed by Zionist groups in Palestine from the post-WWI era of the British Mandate through the early years of the Israeli state. Though not a historian by trade, Suárez ably presents material from British archives, Zionist documents, and other sources to chronicle the relentless onslaught of kidnappings, shootings, and bombings committed by Zionist terror organizations ... an impressive display of historical excavation."
Read full review

Kirkus Reviews
"Moreover—and this is where Suárez is most sharply provocative—the early Zionists also targeted Jews themselves, such as pressuring post–World War II displaced persons to settle in Palestine as well as kidnapping Jewish orphans to keep them from being raised Christian. ... The author emphasizes the anti-Semitic nature of Zionism in creating “a permanent state of emergency” for which a Jewish state in Palestine was the only answer."
Read full review

Labour Briefing
"Many quotes from UK, UN, US and international observers compare the Revisionists and their military operators to the Nazis. It must be the author’s meticulous and voluminous referencing which has safeguarded him from legal action."
Read full review by Glyn Secker

Arab Studies Quarterly
"...it is his painstaking research, which documents the unconscionable strategy and terrorist tactics Zionists used to establish the Israeli Settler State. It mutes any belief that Israel would willingly allow any form of Palestinian self-determination or right of return. State of Terror should be added to the essential sources for researchers on this issue, as well as required reading for university courses on the Palestine/Israel Conflict."
Read full review by Elaine Hagopian

Middle East Media and Books Reviews Online  (highly critical review)
"This is a clear and intense attempt to delegitimize Zionist ideology and in doing so change the traditional historiographic interpretation on the creation of Israel. The author would have the reader consider that there has been a pattern of settler colonialism qua imperialism in place. Some will view this work as a polemic while others can reach a reasonable conclusion of revisionist historical interpretation." 
Read full review by Sanford R. Silverburg, Ph.D

Weekly Worker
"Suarez’s book is based on copious research from the Public Record Office at Kew. A clue to this book’s importance is the fierce campaign waged by the Zionist movement against it and its author ... this book documents how the Israeli state was born in a wave of terror that makes Palestinian guerrilla groups seem like children at play ... it is because the Zionists are unable to attack the message that they are forced to attack the messenger."
Read full review by Tony Greenstein

Algemeiner
"Of the publishing of anti-Israel books there is no end ... State of Terror reveals a state of mind that cannot comprehend the return of Jews to their biblical homeland..." 
Read full review by Jerold Auerbach

CounterCurrents
"[This book] in my opinion, belongs in the top 5 most invaluable books on the history of modern Palestine ... [it] is Palestine’s Yad Vashem."
Read full review by Dr Vacy Vlazna



Endorsements

Ilan Pappé, Historian, Author, and Professor, University of Exeter
“A tour de force, based on diligent archival research that looks boldly at the impact of Zionism on Palestine and its people in the first part of the 20th century. The book is the first comprehensive and structured analysis of the violence and terror employed by the Zionist movement and later the state of Israel against the people of Palestine. Much of the su ering we witness today can be explained by, and connected to, this formative period covered thoroughly in this book.”

Baroness Jenny Tonge
"I thought I knew a fair bit about the Middle East after all the years I've been involved in its politics but this book came as an eye-opener. I realised how ignorant I was, not of the events since the establishment of Israel but of the terror campaign that led up to it. Everyone who has ever accepted Israel’s own account of its history should read this book... It should change them forever."

Cynthia McKinney, former US Congresswoman, and 2008 Presidential candidate of the Green Party
"In this fresh and compelling new book, Suárez cuts through the lies that shield Israel at America’s expense, exposing the reality of the 'conflict' through the simple act of documenting why a tolerant, multi-cultural Palestine became the battleground it is today."










Articles about this book

Jonathan Cook:  Israel, Zionism and the smearing of critics
"As Suarez’s book reveals in shocking detail, any means were seen as legitimate by the Zionists, including violence and terrorism against Palestinian civilians, the British, and even fellow Jews, in their efforts to drive out the native population. ... This is archival history that has been intentionally forced down the memory hole – by Zionist organisations, by Israel and by British officials – for very good reason. It risks reminding us that Israel emerged out of an unholy alliance between, on the one hand, British anti-semites and colonial officials and, on the other, Jewish ethnic supremacists who had adopted for themselves the ugly ideology of Europe’s racial nationalists."
Read full article

Washington Report for Middle East Affairs
Waging Peace / On Sept. 20, 2017 the Jerusalem Fund in Washington, DC welcomed Thomas Suarez to discuss his book, State of Terror: How Terrorism Created Modern Israel (available from AET’s Middle East Books and More). Mohamad Mohamad, executive director of the Jerusalem Fund, introduced Suarez, a London-based writer and a former faculty member of Palestine’s National Conservatory of Music. 
Read full article


Controversy

House of Lords investigates and dismisses a complaint  (March 2017)
Suárez rebuttal, with link to House of Lords paper & complaint

Yisrael Medad critique of the book  (September, 2017)
Suárez rebuttal, with link to original

David Collier & Jonathan Hoffman critique of the book  (September, 2017)
Suárez rebuttal, with link to original
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