Mission & Justice

27/8/08

Israel has nearly doubled settlement construction activity in the occupied West Bank since 2007, a report by the rights group Peace Now says. The report on settlement expansion coincided with the 18th visit by Condoleezza Rice, the US secretary of state, to the Middle East, on Tuesday. Rice urged Israel to stop expanding settlements, deemed illegal under international law, arguing that they were not helpful to the peace process. “The settlement activity is not conducive to creating an environment for negotiations,” Rice said at a news conference with Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, in the West Bank city of Ramallah.

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Akiva Eldar; 25/8/08

The question Kadima voters must ask themselves on the way to the polls is not which candidate is most qualified to order the army chief of staff, at 3 A.M., to launch strikes against Iran. That decision will in any event be made at the White House. The question they face is tenfold more difficult and no less fateful: Which candidate is capable of instructing the chief of staff, at 3 P.M., to evacuate 110 settlements in the West Bank. After all, this was Kadima’s major promise to its voters. “No settlement will remain standing beyond the separation fence,” Ehud Olmert promised in late March 2006, just after his party won the election. In an interview Olmert gave to Newsweek, he explained that the one threat Israel did not know how to deal with is the threat of losing its standing as a Jewish-democratic state.

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12/8/08

Israeli security forces have started to use liquid “skunk bombs” to disperse demonstrators in the occupied West Bank, police said yesterday. Israeli defence scientists analysed the foul-smelling liquid squirted by angry or frightened skunks and created a synthetic version for use as a weapon. They said border police used the new crowd-control method for the first time at the weekend near the Palestinian village of Nilin at the weekly demonstration against Israel’s separation barrier.

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10/8/08

The EU has once again condemned Israeli settlement building in occupied Palestinian territory. It did so in no uncertain terms on Friday in a statement that clearly and unequivocally called settlement building in all occupied territory, including East Jerusalem, illegal. Good for the EU. The problem is, Israel just does not care. Why should it? Last month, the EU expanded trade ties with Israel. And so, earlier in the week, Israel announced tenders for another 400 settlements in Jerusalem. Late last month, the country announced it would approve a new settlement in the Jordan Valley. Israel does not care what the EU says or does, because the EU remains Israel’s greatest trading partner. It is a weapon Europe has never used. There is some vague provision that the EU will not buy goods or produce from Israeli settlements that by all accounts is easily and constantly avoided simply by putting “Made in Israel” on the label.

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8/8/08

The Israeli army has removed an officer from his post over allegations he ordered a soldier to fire a rubber-coated bullet into the foot of a bound and blindfolded Palestinian. A military spokeswoman said a decision on legal proceedings against Lieutenant-Colonel Omri Borberg is expected soon. Borberg, a regimental commander, was suspended last month pending a military investigation. He could still face prosecution, but B’Tselem, an Israeli human rights group, said on Wednesday that a deal in which he could face the minor charge of inappropriate behaviour was “disgraceful”.

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Nadav Shragai, 5/8/08

The Homesh First Movement is expected to announce Tuesday that settlement groups are planning to return to settlements in Gush Katif evacuated during the August 2005 disengagement from the Gaza Strip. The core settlement groups hope to return the minute it is acceptable from a security standpoint, explained Boaz Haetzni, one of the leaders of the movement. Haetzni told Haaretz that as soon as the Israel Defense Forces reenters the Gaza Strip, “and in our estimation the ‘big operation’ is only a matter of time, we will follow them in. We will not ask for permission from anyone. The [settlement] groups will be ready, and this evening we will start an organized sign-up for them. These core groups will do exactly what the group that reestablished Kfar Etzion did after 1967. They will return to the lands where they existed in the past, and will rebuild them,” said Haetzni.

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James Hider; 26/7/08

Israel has dusted off controversial plans to build the first Jewish settlement in the West Bank in a decade, at a time when hopes for renewed peace and the swift creation of a Palestinian state are already flagging. The decision to start building 20 homes at a former military base in Maskiot in the Jordan Valley came as government statistics revealed that the settler population in the West Bank - known to Israelis as Judea and Samaria - had risen by 15,000 people last year, despite an official freeze in construction. The figures marked a 5.5per cent growth in the settler population in occupied Palestinian land, which is a serious blow to the promises to halt settlement growth made by Israel at the Annapolis peace conference in Maryland in November. While Palestinian leaders condemned the planned settlement, Israeli soldiers and policemen clashed with settlers in the West Bank when they tried to investigate allegations of illegal construction. One settler grabbed a rifle from a soldier and fired it in the air before being overpowered.

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24/7/08

Conditions for Palestinians living in Gaza have deteriorated to unprecedented levels, according to a report by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA). Aid granted to Gaza has failed to stop more than half of the population in the territory from sliding below the poverty line, UNRWA said on Thursday. “The number of households in Gaza below the consumption poverty line [has] continued to grow, reaching 51.8 per cent in 2007 despite significant amounts of emergency and humanitarian assistance,” the report said. Salem Ajluni, an economist with UNRWA and author of the report, told Al Jazeera that the situation in Gaza has worsened because of the long-running Israeli blockade.

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Daoud Kuttab; 24/7/08

Without realising it, an American philanthropic organisation, planning to set up a $16.5 million children’s hospital in Palestine, is on a collision course with radical Jewish settlers at a time that American officials are constantly repeating calls for a contiguous and independent Palestinian state. One wonders how someone like Barack Obama, who is presently visiting the region, would respond to actions by Jewish settlers preventing the creation of a hospital. The story began on April 26, 2007 when the Israeli army unilaterally removed its military base from an area of land south of Bethlehem. Locally referred to as Ush Al Ghurab (which literally means the nest of the falcon, the area lies within the municipal boundaries of Beit Sahour, a Palestinian town built on the fields where Christians believe angels appeared to shepherds watching their flocks at night, heralding the coming of Jesus. Once the Israeli army dismantled their equipment, the city’s Palestinian Christian Mayor Hani Hayeq, and the city council announced that they are willing to contribute the land free of charge to any local or international organisation that is interested in using it for the public good. At nearly the same time, a US-based organisation was looking for land to build an orthopaedic hospital for the children of Palestine.

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20/7/08

Gordon Brown, the British prime minister, has arrived in the Middle East for two days of talks to promote “an economic road map for peace”. “Israeli settlements are a hindrance to peace and must be frozen,” he said on Sunday at a news conference held in the West Bank town of Bethlehem. Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, also spoke at the conference that marked Brown’s first visit to the Middle East since becoming prime minister in June 2007. “Israel is not concerned with the principles of the Annapolis conference, namely freezing settlement expansion,” Abbas said.

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