Yet another land-grab disguised as a “resettlement” programme. A plan to resettle thousands of Bedouins is causing controversy in Israel. More than 40,000 Palestinian Israelis will be evicted if the plan goes ahead.
Tag Archive for 'Israeli-Palestinian conflict'
Shortages in Gaza are not new. But for weeks now there’s been a new challenge -fuel supplies are running out. The tunnels widely used to smuggle goods are being shut down by the Egyptian military.
Dr. Ilan Pappé is an Israeli historian who was a senior lecturer at Haifa University from 1984-2007. His position as an Israeli academic gave him access to official Israeli historical archives. Through research this Israeli-born academic learned the truth about the Israeli narrative. This clip of a lecture he gave in the US clarifies what happened on 1948, May 15th as Yawm An-Nakba or “Day of the Catastrophe.”
“It was suggested to them that so few years after the Holocaust it wasn’t a good idea to portray the Jews as murderers, expellers, looters, occupiers, and colonizers. This was a conscious decision by the political elites of the West to atone for what Europe did to the Jews in the Second World War. The price was very clear, the dispossession of Palestine.”
Interesting section of an interview with scholar Ilan Pappe:
The Palestinians in Israel are discriminated on 3 levels. The first is legal. By law, the fact that you are Palestinian means that you have fewer rights than a Jew. The most important law in this regard is the law on land ownership. According to the Israeli law, the land in Israel belongs to the Jewish people and them only. As a non-Jew, you are not allowed to trade or to purchase land and we are talking about 93% of the land. That’s why the Palestinians can’t grow and expand within Israel. Other laws do not specifically talk about the Palestinians, this is an old Israeli trick. The law says that if you have not served in the army you cannot have full rights as a student for example. You won’t get student’s subsidies, health services allowances, social security et al. All those things that the Western countries try to give to their citizens come with the precondition of military service in Israel. It is a trick because the Israelis do not want the Palestinians to serve in the army, in fact they are not allowed even if they would want to. There is an exception when it comes to Orthodox Jews, they do not serve in the army but they are not discriminated because they have a special annex to the Israeli budget. The Orthodox Jews get the money that the state would have used if they would have served in the army. So, Israeli law speaks for itself because it says that if you are Palestinian, you are a second-class citizen. Continue reading ‘Ilan Pappé: “The Zionist goal from the very beginning was to have as much of Palestine as possible with as few Palestinians in it as possible”’