Monday, June 30, 2014

[ePalestine] 'So long, Israel, and thanks for nothing' (By Carol Daniel Kasbari)

Carol and Osama are good friends; it's sad to see them leave, physically that is. I am constantly asked by visitors, what I think the ultimate goal of Israeli actions on the ground is. Well, this is it. The goal is for us to leave or vanish--no less. Given we will do neither, collectively, as a people, buckle up for the long haul. Humanity must prevail before peace pokes out its head.

Read their story here:

'So long, Israel, and thanks for nothing'

As a Palestinian Israeli married to a Palestinian, we've been waiting for Israel to grant us permission to live together. 15 years later, forced to choose between homeland and family unity, we have finally left.

By Carol Daniel Kasbari | Jun. 15, 2014
http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-1.598872
http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-1.598872


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Thursday, June 19, 2014

[ePalestine] Palestinians must be stopped!



Palestinians must be stopped!

By Sam Bahour


I have had enough of those Palestinians. I think the world in general is also fed up with Palestinians. They have gone too far in demonizing Israelis and must be stopped. The international community must act now before it is too late and Israel is wiped off the map and a second tragedy of historic proportions fall on a significant part of the world’s Jewish population.

For starters, Palestinians embarked by land, sea and air onto Israel and displaced more than half the Jewish population of Israel in 1948. Imagine, more than half of the population of Israel displaced, forced to live to this day, 66 years later, in squalid refugee camps only hours from their homes. Other than some faint attempts to fight their way back to their homes in Israel, Israeli refugees have been “unreasonably reasonable” in accepting their fate, and continue to patiently wait for word when they can return home to Israel. This man made tragedy was perpetrated by Palestinians, who continue to this day to strangulate Jewish citizens of Israel by the use of brute force and economic suffocation in an attempt to have them voluntarily emigrate elsewhere.

Palestinians are a violent people. Every Palestinian high school graduate is forced into mandatory conscription, three years for males and two years for females. During this military stint, every Palestinian citizen is trained on the use of weapons and combat methods. Many Palestinians brag about how they brutalize Jewish Israelis during their military service; some have even posted photos on their Facebook wall of them posing with Israeli corpses or a blindfolded Israeli who was taken prisoner.

Palestinians are making Israeli livelihood miserable. They have set up military checkpoints in and around major Israeli cities, like Tel Aviv, Haifa, and Eilat. Palestinian soldiers stop only Israeli cars, sometimes for hours on end, while letting Palestinian registered cars ride through their checkpoints unhindered. When an Israeli wants to leave Israel, s/he must get Palestinian permission beforehand. If any Israeli gets on the Palestinian blacklist, his/her ability to leave Israel is impossible. Imagine not being able to leave your own country or being allowed to leave but not to return. Even when Israelis want to travel from one Israeli city to another, Palestinians have set up checkpoints, which resemble the border terminals between the US and Canada, with one difference: the process to pass is one of pure humiliation, more like cattle being pushed through caged pathways than passengers crossing a terminal.

Israel has a huge potential to be a regional economic hub of tourism and trade, but Palestinians are blocking Israel’s ability to economically develop by every means possible. Israelis love technology, but every smartphone in Israel is a dumb phone because Palestinians are refusing to allocate the electromagnetic spectrum—which they control as part of their occupation of Israel—required for 3G services to Israeli telecommunications companies. Can you imagine, those Palestinians are actually refusing to free the airspace above Tel Aviv to Israelis! It gets worse. Israelis have found a huge natural gas well in Israeli territorial waters, in the sea of Tel Aviv, and the Palestinians are refusing to give Israeli firms access to tap the gas. Even Israeli fishermen are routinely shot at when fishing in the Mediterranean Sea.

As if all of this was not bad enough, for the past 47 years Palestinians have slowly moved their citizens to the hilltops around Israeli cities. The hilltops were first confiscated by the use of force, then Arafat, and now Abbas, send Palestinian security forces to protect the confiscated lands. Once the lands are ready, Palestinians have tapped the huge amounts of funds that donors have passed to them and used the funds, not to build schools and a health care system, but rather to build permanent housing in these military enclaves around Israeli cities, in order to entice Palestinians from Ramallah and Hebron to move to Tel Aviv and other Israeli cities. This is not only against international law, but defies common sense. How can Palestinians keep paying lip service to wanting to live in peace with Israelis when they keep gobbling up more Israeli land and move their population to take up residence inside Israel?

You think it cannot get worse? Well, you’re wrong. Palestinians have kidnapped 5,000 Israelis from their homes, about 200 are Israeli children under 18 years old, and have locked them into Palestinian jails. These jails that the Palestinians maintain are all built inside Palestinian lands in the West Bank and Gaza. When Israeli mothers want to go visit their loved ones, they must get permission from Palestinian security forces to visit. Hundreds of those 5,000 prisoners are being held without charge; the Palestinians deceitfully call it Administrative Detention. You would think the world would hold these Palestinian jailers accountable, but they haven’t for decades. This is why the time has come to stop those Palestinians once and for all.

Israelis cannot be expected to live like this forever. Something must be immediately done to stop these Palestinians and hold them accountable for the daily atrocities that they are committing against humanity. Israelis are a peace loving people. They come from a religion that rests on a pillar of social justice. What is being done to them is beyond imagination.

Israeli civil society has made a call for the world to divest from Palestine. Israelis across the political spectrum are referring to how Jews around the world supported the boycott and divestment of Apartheid South Africa, which successfully collapsed that racist regime. Jews are pointing to their always being on the correct side of history, from the US civil rights movement to people’s struggles in Latin America. They now beg the world to act to stop Palestinians before it is too late.

The time is now to boycott Palestine, divest from Palestine, and apply serious sanctions on Palestine until it removes the boot of military occupation from the necks of Israelis.

Sam Bahour is a Palestinian-American business consultant in Ramallah, the West Bank, and blogs at epalestine.com. He contributes this satirical piece in the spirit of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984). To make this piece fit today’s reality, just reverse the roles of Israel/Israelis and Palestine/Palestinians.

http://bit.ly/palestinians-must-be-stopped 

Translated to Italian here: http://www.osservatorioiraq.it/punti-di-vista/i-palestinesi-devono-essere-fermati
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Saturday, June 14, 2014

[ePalestine] TPM Cafe: The Presbyterian Church’s Tough Love Of Israel

Hebrew translation here.

TPM Cafe: Opinion

The Presbyterian Church's Tough Love Of Israel

By Sam Bahour
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Tuesday, June 03, 2014

[ePalestine] MEE: Voices on unity: Mixed responses to the new Palestinian government

Middle East Eye - Tuesday 3 June 2014



Sam Bahour, Policy Advisor, Al-Shabaka, The Palestinian Policy Network:

Palestinians have finally created what has been coined as a "unity government" after nearly eight years of paralysing division between the two largest political parties, Fatah and Hamas. This step is extremely overdue, but should be welcomed nevertheless for what it is - a baby step in the right direction, finally accepting government for what it is, a branch of politics and not some technocratic institute.

The Palestinian political spectrum is much more colourful than the bipolar duopoly that this new government depicts. If Palestinian decision-makers are serious about reconstituting an operating Palestinian political system, then no time should be wasted in passing a political party law so new political groupings, mainly youth groups, can organise politically, and then subsequently be allowed to enter elections for all levels of Palestinian governance - starting with the PLO and ending with the Palestinian Legislative Council.

In the meantime, US and Israeli threats against the government because Hamas has joined it are strategically misplaced. One must ask, where does the US and Israel want Hamas to be – in a transparent political system or in underground trenches? Regardless, the Palestinian government is not any other country's business, unless that is, they allow Palestinians to choose the Israelis we accept to lead Israel.

- See more at: http://www.middleeasteye.net/news/voices-unity-mixed-responses-new-palestinian-government



سام بحّور، مستشار في السياسات، شبكة السياسات الفلسطينية (الشبكة)

أنشأ الفلسطينيون أخيرا ما استُحدِثَ على تسميته "حكومة الوحدة" وذلك بعد مرور ما يقارب ثمانية أعوام من الانقسام بين أكبر حزبيْن سياسييْن –فتح وحماس- الذي أصاب بالشّلل كافة مناحي حياة الشعب الفلسطيني. لقد تأخرت هذه الخطوة كثيراً، ومع ذلك فإنه يتعيّن الترحيب بها لما تمثّله من خطوة صغيرة في الاتجاه الصحيح من خلال القبول بالحكومة في نهاية المطاف على أنها فرعا من السياسة وليس مؤسسة تكنوقراطية.

إن الطيف السياسي الفلسطيني أكثر تنوعا من احتكارا ثنائيّ القطب ترسم معالمه هذه الحكومة الجديدة. وإذا كان صانعو القرارات الفلسطينيون جادّين حيال إعادة هيكلة النظام السياسي الفلسطيني المعمول به، فإنه يتعيّن عدم إضاعة الوقت سدى بغية سنّ قانون للأحزاب السياسية من شأنه أن يتيح للمجموعات السياسية الجديدة –ولا سيّما المجموعات الشبابية- أن تنظّم ذاتها سياسيا بحيث يكون متاحا لها أن تخوض غمار الانتخابات على كافة أصعدة الحكم الفلسطيني ابتداءً بانتخابات منظمة التحرير الفلسطينية وانتهاءً بانتخابات المجلس التشريعي الفلسطيني.

وفي الوقت الراهن، يتبيّن أن التهديدات التي أطلقتها الولايات المتحدة الأمريكية وإسرائيل ضد الحكومة نظرا لانضمام حماس إليها ليست في موضعها المناسب من الناحية الإستراتيجية. إذ يمكن للمرء أن يتساءل أين تريد الولايات المتحدة وإسرائيل أن تكون حماس؟ أتريدانها أن تكون في نظام سياسي يتّسم بالشفافية أو متمترسةً في الخنادق تحت سطح الأرض؟ إن مسألة تشكيل الحكومة -وبغضّ النظر عن موقف الولايات المتحدة وإسرائيل منها- ليست من شؤون أي دولة أخرى إلا إذا سمحت هذه الدول للفلسطينيين أن يختاروا الإسرائيليين الذين يقبلونهم لقيادة إسرائيل.

-        للمزيد:


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Monday, June 02, 2014

[ePalestine] Who Profits: Made in Israel - Agricultural export from occupied territories

Who Profits

http://www.whoprofits.org/sites/default/files/made_in_israel_web_final.pdf
New report:

Made in Israel - Agricultural export from occupied territories

The report concerns the major Israeli agricultural export companies presently operating in occupied territories and demonstrates the severe implications of an Israeli-only agriculture in occupied Palestinian and Syrian lands.

For the full report, see: http://bit.ly/1oKuSCP (in English), http://bit.ly/1oKv9px (in Arabic).

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