The noose is tightened by the actions of the Israeli military and police. Averaged out, Israel has killed over 10 Palestinians per week over the past 15 years, according to statistics compiled by B’Tselem. Granted, some of these Palestinians were engaged in violently resisting the Israeli occupation, but the vast majority were not. Who among us wouldn’t be angry if they heard three of their neighbors were murdered when their house was firebombed, or to see entire neighborhoods of your country decimated?

And this is further exacerbated by the presence of armed settlers who are protected by the Israeli military and police, even while committing violent crimes. This double standard that exists in relation to breaking the peace, and even the law, is stifling. There is little doubt that if a band of Palestinians walked up to an Israeli settlement and set fire to its fields that Israeli forces would open fire on them. It took only a couple of days for Israeli forces to arrest suspects in the killing of the couple in their car a few weeks ago. But what about justice for the Palestinian family that was burnt alive? How many times have Israeli settlers attacked Palestinian villagers while Israeli soldiers stood in their midst and the moment the Palestinians come out to defend their village, they are fired upon by soldier and settler alike. And now, even a mere accusation of attempting a stabbing is enough to get a Palestinian killed, even without evidence of a knife.

So if the Israeli cabinet is looking for someone or something to blame, blame the occupation. Blame the double standards. Blame the military and paramilitary forces that have no connection to any semblance of a moral compass. And then, instead of bombing, perhaps now might be a good time to make amends. Because the desperation among Palestinians is only going to increase. And as we have seen from the past three weeks, there are many who just can’t take it anymore.

(HRC quote transcribed from pic)

“I am alarmed by the recent wave of attacks against Israelis, including more than a dozen separate attacks since last Saturday. My thoughts and prayers are with the victims and their families. Men and women living in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, and elsewhere cannot carry groceries or travel to prayer without looking over their shoulder. It is wrong, and it must stop. There's no place for violence--only dialogue can produce a lasting peace.”

By stalling while deepening the occupation, successive Israeli leaders — of whom Netanyahu is only the most recent — have dragged Israelis and Palestinians into a dance of death.


The terminology one applies to this latest spike in violence is academic. It also distracts from the underlying and fundamental issue: that successive Israeli leaders have, like the knight in The Seventh Seal, tried to cheat the inevitable, which in this case is the end of the occupation. Israeli leaders continuously choose the path of dodging fate, notching up one Pyrrhic victory after another over the Palestinians in an attempt to buy a little more time, seize a little more land, and shore up a little more political support.

For the time being — as my colleague Noam Sheizaf recently wrote on this site — Israel still holds the tools to end the occupation with a degree of control over the matter. And it will and must end; such a combustible situation, in which millions of Palestinians are bottled up and subject to the one-two of both random and structural violence that military occupation brings, cannot continue indefinitely.

Flare-ups such as the current “wave of violence” (which is only the “latest round” for Israelis — arbitrary lethal violence is a daily fact of life for Palestinians under occupation and siege) may act as a valve to temporarily release pressure. Ultimately, however, a meltdown is unavoidable. If the recalcitrance of the Israeli leadership — of whom Benjamin Netanyahu is simply the latest, and probably worst, incarnation — continues, the occupation will be ended on Israel’s behalf. The unpredictability of such a process does not need spelling out and risks coming at a price greater than anything we have witnessed until now.

GAZA CITY (Ma’an) -- A doll and a few toys were the only belongings left by two-year-old Rahaf Hassan when she was killed along with her 25-year-old pregnant mother in an Israeli airstrike in southern Gaza City on Sunday.

Shortly before the attack, Rahaf and her mother had been safe in their family home, which lies among olive groves in an agricultural area, seemingly far from any military presence.

Israel claims that the house lay close to a military base used by Palestinian resistance fighters, justifying a missile fired by an M16 Israeli fighter jet that in the early hours of Sunday brought the house crashing down.

The family was trapped among the rubble, Rahaf's father, Yahya, told Ma'an, and his two-year-old daughter screamed for him in the hope he would hurry to pull her out.

Israel’s Deputy Defense Minister Eli Ben-Dahan said yesterday: “Palestinians have to understand they won’t have a state & Israel will rule over them.”

The report is in Hebrew from Udi Segal of Israeli Channel 10, as translated by David Sheen on Facebook and Emily Hauser.

Ben-Dahan referred to Palestinians as animals in 2013, according to the Times of Israel:

“To me, they are like animals, they aren’t human.”

Last Saturday an Israeli policeman shot and killed Fadi Alloun, a 19-year-old resident of the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Issawiya, after he was suspected of stabbing a 15-year-old Israeli near Jerusalem’s Damascus Gate.

A video that went viral following the incident shows young Jewish Israelis egging on the policemen to kill Alloun, despite the fact that it is unclear from the video whether he posed a threat when an officer shot him numerous times. The Israeli media reported that he was shot while “trying to escape from the security forces that began chasing him. After refusing to release his grip on the knife, the forces shot and killed him.”

It was clear that that first part was a lie from the get go: Alloun never tried to escape. However, a new video that captures the scene from a different angle shows that Alloun wasn’t holding a knife when he was shot, and therefore did not pose a threat. Moreover, this was the reason an officer who stood near the person filming the incident chose not to shoot Alloun. He chose neither to shoot nor use his weapon as threat as Alloun walked by him. He didn’t shoot when the teenagers nearby yelled “Shoot him, bitch!” or “Pepper spray? What kind of policemen are you?” while warning Alloun that he was “about to die.” When it was all over, the police officer who refused to shoot Alloun became the target of verbal abuse by those same teenagers.

And while this particular policeman acted appropriately, additional officers who arrived on the scene chose to act differentkly. Seconds after they exit their vehicles, one of the teenagers — who would later celebrate Alloun’s killing by shouting “death to Arabs” — tells the officers that Alloun had just stabbed someone and that they should shoot without any attempt to subdue him. The officers did not even yell at Alloun to throw down the knife — that’s because there was no knife and Alloun posed no threat. They did not even yell at him to give up or to let him know that he was under arrest.

Brandishing their typical black and yellow flags and Hebrew signs boasting “Kahane was Right” and “There is no co-existence with cancer,” hundreds of right-wing activists took to the streets of Jerusalem Thursday night in a growing phenomenon of public demonstrations led by the country’s leading fascist groups such as Lahava and La Familia. Despite negligible attempts by Israeli police to force the demonstrators from proceeding (the demonstration was not granted prior police approval), the Jewish crowds began marching at around 9 pm when police officers made it readily apparent that they had no intention of halting the mostly youth from making their away across the city

Guided and instigated by far-right ideologues such as Benzion Gopstein and Baruch Marzel, the crowds chanted their usual “Death to Arabs,” “A Jew has a soul, an Arab is a son of a whore,” and other similar malicious slogans.

The marauding Jews marched from the city’s main soccer stadium to the Old City before scores of Israeli riot police prevented them from crossing into the neighboring Palestinians neighborhoods. Upon being denied access to cross the Old City, scuffles and outright fighting erupted between Jewish protesters and riot police, which according to police spokeswoman Luba Samri, resulted in the arrest of four individuals, including three 16 year olds and Gopstein himself. Throughout the ensuing clashes, rocks and pebbles were thrown directly at the police officers, accompanied by the occasional chant of “Arab lovers” and “Israel is a police state.” From there, the demonstrators dispersed, with many of them raiding the nearby Mamilla shopping center that abuts Jaffa Gate, continuing their chants against Arabs and searching for Palestinians to intimidate and harass. Although the current author did not witness the disturbances in Mamilla, media reports confirm several instances of attacks committed by Jewish rioters, including the use of pepper spray against Arab pedestrians.

Although settler violence has been getting more media attention since the firebombing that killed three Palestinians this summer, the true scale of the violence is still under-reported. In fact, there have been more than 122 Israeli settler attacks on Palestinians in the last week, according to the PLO’s Negotiations Affairs Department.

Here is a timeline of those attacks (documentation here). This violence coincides with the murder of an Israeli settler couple on October 1 and tension over the al-Aqsa compound in Jerusalem.

Twelve years ago, in its report on the events of October 2000, the Or Commission of Inquiry wrote a statement that was unprecedented in the history of Israel’s Palestinian minority. After extensively criticizing the police’s violent conduct, the commission concluded: “The police must instill among its officers the understanding that the Arab community as a whole is not their enemy, and that it should not be treated as an enemy.”

Though perhaps unintended, the commission’s statement amounted to a symbolic indictment of Israel’s longstanding “enemy doctrine” toward its Palestinian citizens. For the first time, an official Israeli body was acknowledging the systemic hostility behind the state’s policies since 1948, and determined that those attitudes had to change in order to resolve the roots of the people’s grievances.


Twelve years later, however, it is clear that Israel has not absorbed any lessons from the report. Far from revising its enemy doctrine, the state has intensified it. Government ministers in charge of law enforcement spew out racist speech to delegitimize the rights of Palestinian citizens. The Shin Bet routinely monitors and harasses Palestinian activists for attending demonstrations or writing social media posts against Israeli policies. Now police officers have permission to open fire on Palestinians who throw stones in Israel just as they do against Palestinians in the occupied territories.

http://972mag.com/watch-israeli-undercover-agents-shoot-unarmed-boy-at-point-blank-range/112474/

A video released Wednesday onto several social media accounts and published by several news outlets shows Israeli plainclothes undercover officers apparently shooting an unarmed Palestinian youth in the leg at point blank range, while other undercover officers hold him down.

The shooting and beating took place during clashes in between Ramallah and the Beit El settlement, which abuts the de facto Palestinian capital and hosts the army’s regional headquarters base.

Several videos of the same event emerged on Wednesday, showing the Israeli plainclothes troops wearing keffiyehs wrapped around their faces, infiltrating the West Bank demonstration and then either shooting toward demonstrators at close range with handguns, or assaulting them and dragging them away to military vehicles.


Reuters bureau chief Luke Baker confirmed via a tweet that he had viewed footage of Israeli undercover officers throwing stones at soldiers and encouraging the Palestinian youth around them to do the same.