Netanyahu asked to form new government, but faces long odds
By JOSEF FEDERMAN
Today
JERUSALEM (AP) — Israel’s president on Tuesday handed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu the difficult task of trying to form a new government, giving the embattled Israeli leader a chance to extend his lengthy term in office.
But with the newly elected parliament deeply divided and the prime minister on trial for corruption charges, Netanyahu had little to celebrate.
He now has up to six weeks to lure his political foes into a coalition, an effort that appears to have slim odds of success. At the same time, those opponents will be working to form an alternative government that could end his 12-year reign.
In a meeting with members of his Likud party, Netanyahu struck a statesmanlike tone, saying he would be the prime minister of all of Israel’s citizens, Jewish and Arab, religious and secular.
“We will take care of everyone,” he said, vowing to “take Israel out of the cycle of recurring elections and to establish a strong government for all citizens of Israel.”
President Reuven Rivlin turned to Netanyahu in the wake of Israel’s fourth inconclusive election in the past two years.
In a post-election ritual, Rivlin had consulted Monday with each of the 13 parties elected to the Knesset, or parliament, in hopes of finding a consensus on a candidate for prime minister. But neither Netanyahu, nor his main rival, Yair Lapid, received the endorsement of a majority of lawmakers.
As he announced his decision Tuesday, an anguished Rivlin said no candidate had the support needed to form a majority coalition in the 120-seat Knesset. He also noted that there are many misgivings about Netanyahu remaining in office while on trial.
Yet he said there was nothing in the law preventing Netanyahu from continuing as prime minister and said he believed that Netanyahu had a better chance than his rivals of cobbling together a coalition.
“This is not an easy decision on a moral and ethical basis,” Rivlin said. “The state of Israel is not to be taken for granted. And I fear for my country.”
Netanyahu did not attend Tuesday’s announcement, as is tradition, and later Rivlin did not appear with Netanyahu in the usual photo of the new parliament's swearing-in — moves local media interpreted as a show of the president's unhappiness with the situation.
Netanyahu now has an initial period of 28 days to put together a coalition, a period that Rivlin could extend for an additional two weeks.
Netanyahu has received the endorsement of 52 lawmakers, more than his rivals, but still short of the 61-seat majority needed to form a government.
Securing the support of nine more lawmakers will not be easy. Netanyahu will use his formidable powers of persuasion, coupled with generous offers of powerful government ministries, to court his potential partners.
Netanyahu will likely require the backing of Raam, a small Arab Islamist party. Raam’s leader, Mansour Abbas, has left the door open to cooperating with Netanyahu if he aids Israel’s Arab sector, which has long suffered from crime, discrimination and poverty.
But one of Netanyahu’s allies, the Religious Zionist party, has an openly racist platform and refuses to serve in a government with Arab partners. Netanyahu could appeal to the rabbis who serve as the party’s spiritual guides in hopes of changing minds.
Netanyahu will also likely need the support of Yamina, a religious nationalist party led by former ally turned rival, Naftali Bennett, who also has been cool to an alliance with Arab parties.
Bennett, a former aide to Netanyahu, promised Tuesday to negotiate in “good faith,” but made no promises to his former mentor.
Netanyahu’s last hope will be to try to lure “defectors” from other opposition parties. For now, however, Netanyahu’s opponents have vowed to stand firm, especially after the painful experience of the previous government.
Following elections last year, Netanyahu and his main rival at the time, Benny Gantz, agreed to an “emergency” government to confront the coronavirus crisis. Their partnership was plagued by infighting and collapsed in half a year, triggering the March 23 election.
“The chances of Netanyahu to form a government, as it seems right now, are quite low,” said Yohanan Plesner, president of the Israel Democracy Institute, a Jerusalem think tank.
Looming over the negotiations will be Netanyahu’s corruption trial, which resumed this week with testimony from the first of a string of witnesses to testify against him.
Netanyahu has been charged with fraud, breach of trust and accepting bribes in a series of scandals. He denies the charges and this week compared the case to “an attempted coup.”
Lapid, head of the centrist Yesh Atid party, acknowledged Tuesday that the law left Rivlin “no choice,” but nonetheless said that tapping Netanyahu was a “shameful disgrace that tarnishes Israel.”
Lapid has offered an alternative: a power-sharing arrangement with Bennett that would see the two men rotate between the prime minister’s job. They are expected to hold intense negotiations in the coming weeks.
Plesner, a former Knesset member, said the partnership between Bennett and Lapid has “a reasonable likelihood of materializing.”
Lapid would be able to deliver his key campaign promise of ousting Netanyahu, while Bennett, whose party has just seven seats, would be the first to be prime minister.
“For both of them, it’s a very lucrative deal,” Plesner said.
Gayil Talshir, a political scientist at Israel’s Hebrew University, said that Netanyahu’s opponents who share his hard-line ideology, including Bennett, would prefer to see him fail before banding together against him.
“Otherwise, they would’ve been thought of, from their own right-wing base perspective as traitors,” she said.
The new parliament takes office at a time of deep polarization in Israeli society. Last month’s election was seen as a referendum on Netanyahu’s divisive leadership style, and the result was continued deadlock.
Netanyahu’s supporters view him as a global statesman who is uniquely suited to leading the country. His opponents accuse him of pushing the country through repeated elections in hopes of producing a parliament that will grant him immunity from criminal prosecution.
In a sign of those divisions, about 100 protesters hoisted LGBT pride flags and a mock submarine in a noisy demonstration outside the Knesset as the new parliament was sworn in. The pride flags were aimed at the pro-Netanyahu Religious Zionists, whose members are openly homophobic, while the submarine points to a graft scandal involving the purchase of German subs.
As the new Knesset was sworn into office, Rivlin appealed for unity. It was the last time Rivlin will address such a gathering, and the outgoing president, who leaves office this summer, appeared emotional.
“If we do not learn and find a model of partnership that will allow us to live here together, out of mutual respect for each other, out of commitment to each other, and genuine solidarity, our national resilience will be in real danger,” he said.
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
What was that about an apartheid state? Sure, everything is fine, great actually. Particularly if you happen to be Palestinian.
Israel is committing the crime of apartheid, new report says
Israeli authorities are “committing the crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution,” according to a major new 213-page report released Tuesday by global advocacy group Human Rights Watch. The organization argued that, in terms framed by existing international law, overarching Israeli policy toward Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem constituted an agenda to both maintain Jewish Israeli domination and systematically oppress Palestinians.
Beyond the all-but-dead “peace process” of the past few decades, the organization pointed to the inescapable and unequal reality that defines life for everyone living between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. “This is the most stark finding Human Rights Watch has ever reached on the conduct of Israeli authorities,” Omar Shakir, the organization’s Israel and Palestine director and the author of the report, told Today’s WorldView. “For too long, the international community has failed to recognize the reality on the ground for what it is.”
Shakir added that HRW is hardly alone in arriving at this conclusion.
For years, Palestinians have invoked apartheid in discussing the region’s status quo: where an Israeli military occupation governs over many aspects of their lives, where the security and political imperatives of the Israeli government curtail their own rights, and where the expansion of Jewish settlements inexorably entails further Palestinian dispossession.
The discrimination also extends to within Israel proper, where Israeli citizens of Palestinian descent have “a status inferior to Jewish citizens by law,” observed HRW. In the Palestinian territories, theweakness and dysfunction of the Palestinian Authority — which was meant only to be a transitional entity until Israel and Palestinian officials reached a more permanent settlement, but is now a bitterly unpopular institution that holds sway in parts of the occupied territories — does not absolve an Israeli government that effectively calls all the shots.
Many Israelis see this, too. “If we keep controlling the whole area from the Mediterranean to the river Jordan where some 13 million people are living … if only one entity reigned over this whole area, named Israel,” former prime minister Ehud Barak said in 2017, “it would become inevitably … either non-Jewish or nondemocratic.” In January, Israeli human rights group B’Tselem published a position paper arguing that the prevailing order in the country was that of an “apartheid regime,” whose program of supremacy has “gradually grown more institutionalized and explicit.”
Human Rights Watch is not arguing that Israel is an “apartheid state.” In its report, “A Threshold Crossed: Israeli Authorities and the Crimes of Apartheid and Persecution,” the organization waves away the need to summon direct parallels to South Africa, whose white-supremacist regime introduced “apartheid” to the world. Instead, it points to the salience of apartheid as a universal legal term codified in a number of international conventions, including the 1998 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.
“Laws, policies, and statements by leading Israeli officials make plain that the objective of maintaining Jewish Israeli control over demographics, political power, and land has long guided government policy,” noted the organization. “In pursuit of this goal, authorities have dispossessed, confined, forcibly separated, and subjugated Palestinians by virtue of their identity to varying degrees of intensity. In certain areas … these deprivations are so severe that they amount to the crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution.”
In a statement to Today’s WorldView, the Israeli Embassy in Washington described the report as “filled with lies” and personally attacked Shakir, a U.S. citizen who was expelled from Israel in 2019 following a legal battle that went all the way to the country’s highest court. “We strongly reject the false accusations that Human Rights Watch is spreading about Israel,” it said. “This is an organization known to have a long-standing anti-Israel agenda, actively seeking for years to promote boycotts against Israel.”
Shakir was accused of supporting boycotts against Israel in a case that saw Israeli authorities mine his social media accounts to uncover college-era activism from more than 15 years ago in which he called for divestment from companies that profit from Israel’s rule in the occupied territories. “In [Shakir’s] four years as an employee of Human Rights Watch, he said neither he nor the organization have advocated for boycotts against Israel or companies doing business here,” my colleagues reported at the time. “They do call on companies, including Airbnb, not to operate in Israeli settlements, which they characterize as violating international humanitarian law.”
Now, in invoking the crime of apartheid, Human Rights Watch hopes for far tougher international scrutiny of Israel. The report, among other things, calls for the creation of a U.N. commission to investigate systemic discrimination in Israel, asset freezes and sanctions on certain Israeli officials, and the conditioning of military and security assistance to Israel on the basis of its unwinding its policies that constitute “apartheid.”
Such action looks unlikely. For all the increasing partisan rancor in Washington over Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing government and its close dealings with former president Donald Trump, there’s little political will to shake up the Israeli-Palestinian status quo. Three-quarters of the U.S. House of Representatives, including a roughly even mix of Republicans and Democrats, recently signed a letter denouncing a proposed bill that would place additional regulations on U.S. aid to Israel.
But the conversation around Israel is clearly, if slowly, shifting in the United States. “This new HRW report raises critical concerns that should deeply trouble both supporters of Israel and those who care about Palestinian rights,” said Jeremy Ben-Ami, the president of J Street, a liberal pro-Israel advocacy organization in Washington that does not use the term “apartheid” to describe the Israeli context.
“The fact that the occupation inherently threatens Israel’s future as a democratic homeland for the Jewish people and involves the systematic deprivation of Palestinian rights simply cannot be ignored,” he told Today’s WorldView.
Reports suggest the Biden administration will not expend much political capital in an attempt to get the peace process back on track, though it has sought to undo some of the damage caused by Trump, including by resuming funding to the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees.
“Early indications from the Biden administration show this will not be a priority issue,” Shakir said. “But merely reversing 50 percent of what the Trump administration did” is insufficient. Some analysts argue that successive U.S. administrations, including Trump’s, allowed the steady erosion of any possibility of a “two-state solution” by turning a blind eye to Israeli settlement expansion and land grabs in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Meanwhile, Israeli politics have drifted further to the right. Various leading politicians clamor for outright annexation of areas of the West Bank, while a party of far-right extremists associated with a violent Jewish supremacist hate group could join the country’s next ruling coalition government.
Last week, at an event moderated by Today’s WorldView, experts convened by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace released a report calling on the Biden administration to prioritize human rights for every Palestinian and Israeli over the old paradigm of a peace process. “Instead of reviving a moribund peace process or simply abandoning U.S. engagement, President Joe Biden’s administration should place a rights-based approach at the center of its strategy,” they wrote.
But the longer equal rights for Palestinians get deferred, the larger the question of apartheid looms.
In Jaffa, gentrification stokes discord as Arabs pushed out
By ILAN BEN ZION
24 mins ago
TEL AVIV, Israel (AP) — A turreted former Catholic girl's school in Jaffa is being transformed into an exclusive Soho House club. Around the corner, a historic ex-convent is now a five-star hotel. Across the street, the glittering towers of the Andromeda Hill luxury residences overlook the Mediterranean.
But farther down Yefet Street, working class Arabs of Jaffa's Ajami neighborhood face a starkly different reality. With housing prices out of reach, discontent over the city's rapid transformation into a bastion for Israel's ultra-wealthy is reaching a boiling point. The crisis has taken on nationalistic overtones, with some Arab residents accusing the government of trying to push them out to make way for Jews.
“Ninety percent of people here barely make a living, from hand to mouth, they don’t have enough to eat," said Jaffa resident Ibrahim Tartir. "For a young man looking to get married, it’s 5,000, 6,000 shekels ($1,800) for rent, not including water and electricity and the rest. How much does he earn? 6,000 a month. How can he live?”
Jaffa, the historic port at the core of the greater Tel Aviv metropolis, is home to around 20,000 Arab residents, remnants of the Palestinian population that lived there before Israel’s establishment in 1948. The district has undergone extensive gentrification in recent decades with government encouragement.
That trend has accelerated in the past several years as real estate prices have skyrocketed amid surging demand. As wealthy Israelis and foreigners move from other areas of Tel Aviv into Jaffa, its mostly working-class Arab residents have been pushed out. This has added ethnic tensions to an economic phenomenon familiar in other cities around the world.
“We’re reaching a point where Arab people can’t buy houses unless they are very rich,” said Youssef Masharawi, a Jaffa native and professor of physical therapy at Tel Aviv University. He said young Arabs in Jaffa have nowhere to go, unable to afford to start families in their hometown and facing discrimination in nearby Israeli cities with overwhelmingly Jewish populations.
The stress is starting to reach a breaking point.
Long smoldering tensions erupted last week after the rabbi and director of a pre-military religious seminary in the predominantly Arab neighborhood of Ajami were assaulted by two Arab residents while visiting an apartment for sale.
Moshe Schendowich, chief executive of the Meirim B’Yafo seminary, was injured in the incident. He said that while there have been some disagreements with Arab neighbors, those conflicts "should be solved with speech, with talking, not with violence.”
Although the seminary says it isn’t out to push anyone out, some residents view it with suspicion. Its head rabbi is a former West Bank settler and was formally affiliated with Ateret Cohanim, a group that takes over Arab properties in Jerusalem to make way for Jewish settlers. The yeshiva’s website says its aim is to “strengthen Jewish identity and the voice of the Torah, (and) strengthen communities” in Jaffa.
The incident ignited an already flammable situation. In the days following, Arab residents and Jewish supporters faced off against Jewish nationalist counter-protesters. The demonstrations devolved into clashes with police.
Tel Aviv-Jaffa Mayor Ron Huldai condemned the violence but insisted “what we are seeing is not a nationalist conflict between Jews and Arabs."
“It is the product of ongoing frustration of a whole generation of Jaffans that can’t continue to live there,” he said.
But in Israel, nationalist conflict is never far away.
Before Israel's establishment in 1948, Jaffa was a predominantly Arab city of some 100,000 people. During the war surrounding Israel's creation, tens of thousands of Palestinian residents fled or were forced from their homes.
Under a 1950 absentee property law, the new Israeli government confiscated thousands of empty properties and handed them to state-run public housing companies. Many of the Palestinians who remained in Jaffa ended up in these properties.
Since 2011, the Israeli government has pushed to sell off these properties to develop more housing. Although occupants are given an opportunity to buy these homes, the prices are often too high, forcing many longtime residents to move out.
Amidar, a public housing company that manages the buildings, said there is no intention to expel people. "The properties are offered for sale first to tenants at a significant discount and with professional guidance" and most are purchased by residents, it said.
Even with generous terms, however, many low-income residents cannot afford to buy their homes. Many properties have been bought up by developers, resulting in low-income Arab residents being forced out.
On Wednesday, Tel Aviv City Hall announced that it would be opening registration for an affordable housing lottery for 28 units in Jaffa for Arab residents.
“In addition to the project, approval has been granted for a public housing renewal program in Jaffa’s Ajami neighborhood,” city hall said in a statement. “The program will enable 100 existing tenants to remain in renovated properties while increasing supply by a further 200 apartments.”
Ravit Hananel, a professor of urban policy at Tel Aviv University, said the Israeli government has been ridding itself of public housing since the 1980s as it abandoned the country's socialist roots and adopted neo-liberal, capitalist policies.
She said the government pledged to address housing issues after mass social justice protests in 2011. But she said the response has been to push for more privatization, further hurting the disadvantaged.
While this is the case across the country, Jaffa’s rapid gentrification is not simply a case of rich against poor, said Abed Abou Shhadeh, a Tel Aviv city councilman from Jaffa.
“It has a national background behind it, and it’s part of the conflict,” said Abou Shhadeh.
While some try to depoliticize the issue, he said "it’s more than a class war. There’s a very deep rooted political tension happening at the same time, which makes it much more difficult to come with a fair and equal solution.”
Organizers of a recent protest wrote on Facebook that the “economic expulsion and gentrification that’s pushing the Arab community — and also poor Jewish residents — out of the city for the sake of real estate deals continues what was started in 1948." Graffiti on city walls say in Hebrew and Arabic: “Jaffa is not for sale.”
Masharawi, the Jaffa-born professor, called for the construction of affordable housing for young Arabs in Jaffa. He said he was determined to stand his ground against the rising tide of change.
“I will never leave Jaffa even if I am going to die within a small room in the end," he said. “This is my home, my house, my way of life.”
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
Nice to see the Apartheid State in full swing. Jared Dear Boy must be pleased with his "peace" deals.
Opinion: Sheikh Jarrah highlights the violent brazenness of Israel’s colonialist project
Opinion by Noura Erakat
and
Mariam Barghouti
May 10, 2021 at 6:28 p.m. EDT
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Noura Erakat is a human rights attorney and associate professor at Rutgers University. She is the author of “Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine.” Mariam Barghouti is a Palestinian writer and researcher based in Ramallah.
The young Palestinian writer Mohammed El-Kurd sits quietly in front of his laptop with a grin on his face, preparing for the launch of his most recent manuscript, “Rifqa.” He seems excited, anxious and afraid all at once, as he revises his poems and the paragraphs about his grandmother. She died at 103 defending her home from Israeli settlers who had already squatted in one part of it. El-Kurd seems to clutch onto his words in an attempt to ensure that the memory of his grandmother, of himself and his lineage, remains with him.
Some believe that what is documented cannot be lost, but El-Kurd’s calm is broken when we speak of his Jerusalem neighborhood, Sheikh Jarrah, where he and his sister Muna are now trying to highlight the grave violations happening there as they face forced eviction.
Sheikh Jarrah is now practically a war zone as armed Israeli settlers, under the protection of Israeli police, terrorize the Palestinian residents. These are the very settlers who are looking to kick out families, including El-Kurd’s.
Sheikh Jarrah is the latest flashpoint of Israel’s expansionist project. The threats of eviction are part of what Palestinians describe as their “ongoing Nakba,” because the removal and forced exile of 80 percent of historic Palestine’s native population between 1947 and 1949 was not a singular event. It is the same reality we saw in Khan al-Ahmar, and in Araqib before that, and it is how every settlement was solidified, from Tel Aviv in 1948 to the newer settlements of Maali Adumim and Givat Hamatos in the West Bank.
Zionist settlement remains an ongoing process that seeks to remove Palestinian natives and replace them with Jewish-Zionists. In Jerusalem, the forced removals echo throughout the West Bank, throughout Gaza and among Palestinians forcibly exiled in the global diaspora.
Now a new generation has taken to social media, using the hashtag #SaveSheikhJarrah, to once again show Zionist settler violence to the rest of the world. But when the hashtag began to trend in recent days on social media platforms, many activists reported that their posts were being removed; accounts have also been suspended en masse. The apparent censorship of Palestinian protest on social media is another chapter in the months-long campaign urging Facebook not to flag anti-Zionism critique as anti-Semitic hate speech. Many pro-Israel groups are trying to use the empty charges of anti-Semitism to shut down debate about Palestine.
As May 15 marks the 73rd commemoration of the mass expulsion of Palestinians from cities such as Haifa, Tarshiha and Safad in 1948, let the world bear witness to Jerusalem today. This is how refugees are made, this is our ongoing Nakba. Our freedom struggle is not for a state but for belonging to the land, to remain on it, to keep our homes, to resist erasure. But somehow calling it by its name on social media, revealing to the world what has been happening for decades, seems more offensive than our ongoing displacement at gun point.
There’s no denying the reality: This is Zionist settler colonialism, where if one settler does not take our homes, another settler will. When will the world open its eyes to this injustice and respond appropriately? We do not need more empty both sides-isms, we need solidarity to overcome apartheid.
yang is a damned fool for picking that hill to die on.
I was really surprised. I imagine @brianlux will be too.
Pandering to a demographic that has been deemed important in achieving election should never be surprising, unfortunately.
it's a tad different when you are pandering to a demographic that is actively excusing/encouraging the commission of genocide.
Sure, but not surprising.
from Yang, to me, it is surprising.
I guess it is just a personal connection that some feel with politicians. I remember taking a field trip to an air force base that has since closed down in 5th or 6th grade when W was running for governor, I knew instantly that I was not into the show at all. The whole experience was very strange, from all of the little pins & flags that were handed out to the people acting as if this man was much more important than they were, I was turned off to say the least. Everything about the process seemed forced/unnatural to me and it still does.
yang is a damned fool for picking that hill to die on.
I was really surprised. I imagine @brianlux will be too.
Pandering to a demographic that has been deemed important in achieving election should never be surprising, unfortunately.
it's a tad different when you are pandering to a demographic that is actively excusing/encouraging the commission of genocide.
Sure, but not surprising.
from Yang, to me, it is surprising.
I guess it is just a personal connection that some feel with politicians. I remember taking a field trip to an air force base that has since closed down in 5th or 6th grade when W was running for governor, I knew instantly that I was not into the show at all. The whole experience was very strange, from all of the little pins & flags that were handed out to the people acting as if this man was much more important than they were, I was turned off to say the least. Everything about the process seemed forced/unnatural to me and it still does.
that's actually what I liked about Yang; he didn't seem to me like a politician at all. But I guess that was part of the grift. Or maybe he sees it as a means to an end. whatever it is...disappointed.
yang is a damned fool for picking that hill to die on.
I was really surprised. I imagine @brianlux will be too.
Honestly, that issue is such a clusterfuck I don't really share my opinions on it and, in fact, not all of my opinions are fully formed so if I did, I would look like an idiot.
I'm gonna go scrounge around in the fridge...
“The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man [or woman] who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.”
Analysis: Violence upends Biden's Israel-Palestinian outlook
By MATTHEW LEE
2 hours ago
WASHINGTON (AP) — The surge in Israeli-Palestinian violence has flummoxed the Biden administration in its first four months as it attempts to craft a Middle East policy it believes will be more durable and fairer than that of its predecessor.
Its early hesitation to wade more deeply into efforts to resolve the decades-long conflict has created a leadership vacuum that is exacerbated by political uncertainty in Israel and the Palestinian Authority, each of which is clamoring for outside support and unhappy with America’s new determination to toe a middle line.
Israelis and Palestinians alike have denounced the Biden administration's call for all sides to step back following clashes between Israeli security forces and Palestinians in east Jerusalem that escalated into rocket attacks on Israel from the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip and retaliatory strikes from Israel’s military.
“The US State Department message is not acceptable to me,” Israel’s ambassador to the United States, Gilad Erdan, said on Twitter. “It is impossible to put in the same message statements by Israeli leaders who call for calm alongside instigators and terrorist organizations that launch missiles and rockets.”
On the Palestinian side, there is frustration that the U.S. has slow-walked a U.N. Security Council statement that it sees as too unfavorable to Israel.
“The continued paralysis of the Security Council on the situation in Palestine is unacceptable,” the Palestinian ambassador to the United Nations, Riyad Mansour, said Tuesday. “The international community, particularly the Security Council, must condemn all of Israel’s illegal actions.”
Advocates for both sides say the administration appears to be pursuing an interim strategy that lacks coherence and sends mixed messages to the parties, neither of which has shown a willingness to listen or to back down.
The administration, unsurprisingly, has rejected that criticism.
“It is not that we failed to prioritize this,” State Department spokesman Ned Price said Tuesday, after giving a brief description of a call between Secretary of State Antony Blinken and his Israeli counterpart. “The United States is doing what we can knowing that our ability in certain situations is going to be in some cases limited."
President Joe Biden won initial but cautious plaudits from Mideast analysts when he rejected the Trump administration’s unabashedly pro-Israel stance and tentatively embraced the Palestinians by restoring aid and diplomatic contacts.
Yet the Biden administration has also retained key elements of President Donald Trump’s policies, including several that broke with long-standing U.S. positions on Jerusalem and the legitimacy of Israeli settlements that the Palestinians believe are manifestly biased against them. The administration has said little would be accomplished with immediate, wholesale shifts in Israel-Palestinian policy
At the same time, Israelis fear that even subtle shifts away from Trump’s hard line on the Palestinians and Biden’s determination to re-enter the Iran nuclear deal represent a direct threat to its security even as the administration seeks to build on Trump-era Israeli-Arab normalization accords.
“The parties have basically been conditioned over the past four years,” said former U.S. Mideast negotiator Aaron David Miller, who served under both Republican and Democratic administrations. “The Trump sugar high for the Israelis and the vinegar high for the Palestinians have created a certain set of expectations that this administration hasn’t addressed.”
The administration has not yet named an ambassador to Israel nor indicated that it will appoint a special envoy for peacemaking. By contrast, Trump’s nomination of an ambassador to Israel was one of his earliest appointments, announced more than a month before inauguration, and President Barack Obama chose former Sen. George Mitchell to serve as his Middle East peace envoy on his second day in office.
“I realize the administration has lowballed and deprioritized the Middle East and Israeli-Palestinian issue. But the lack of an ambassador to Israel and a consul general in Jerusalem is a serious problem during a crisis," Miller said.
Some Democrats and other progressives are also voicing frustration.
“The United States must call for an immediate cease-fire and an end to provocative and illegal settlement activity. And we must also recommit to working with Israelis and Palestinians to finally end this conflict,” Sen. Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent, said in a statement.
While it has categorically condemned Hamas rocket attacks on Israel and backed Israel’s absolute right to self-defense, the Biden administration has been yet either unwilling or unable to say whether the Palestinians meet the criteria to enjoy that same right of self-defense. It has also not modified long-held U.S. policy that the Palestinians are ineligible to take their grievances to the International Criminal Court because they are not a state.
This apparent contradiction, along with what the Palestinians consider to be a weak response to Israel's threatened evictions of Palestinian families from east Jerusalem that were a proximate cause of the latest tensions, have frustrated those looking for a new U.S. approach.
They note that the Biden administration, through a White House statement, has made clear that it believes “Palestinians and Israelis deserve equal measures of freedom, security, dignity and prosperity.”
“We're still waiting to see equal measures of empathy,” said Zaha Hassan, a visiting fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the lead author of a report it issued last month titled “Breaking the Israel-Palestine Status Quo.” “The administration needs to recognize that Palestinian rights need to be respected.”
Hassan and others have urged the administration to stop resisting international attempts to put pressure on Israel, like stalling a U.N. Security Council statement condemning the violence. Although it won't win Biden friends in Israel, "it will shore up U.S. credibility around the world and obviously with the Palestinians,” Hassan said.
___
EDITOR'S NOTE — AP Diplomatic Writer Matthew Lee has covered the State Department and U.S. foreign policy since 1999.
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
Comments
JERUSALEM (AP) — Israel’s president on Tuesday handed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu the difficult task of trying to form a new government, giving the embattled Israeli leader a chance to extend his lengthy term in office.
But with the newly elected parliament deeply divided and the prime minister on trial for corruption charges, Netanyahu had little to celebrate.
He now has up to six weeks to lure his political foes into a coalition, an effort that appears to have slim odds of success. At the same time, those opponents will be working to form an alternative government that could end his 12-year reign.
In a meeting with members of his Likud party, Netanyahu struck a statesmanlike tone, saying he would be the prime minister of all of Israel’s citizens, Jewish and Arab, religious and secular.
“We will take care of everyone,” he said, vowing to “take Israel out of the cycle of recurring elections and to establish a strong government for all citizens of Israel.”
President Reuven Rivlin turned to Netanyahu in the wake of Israel’s fourth inconclusive election in the past two years.
In a post-election ritual, Rivlin had consulted Monday with each of the 13 parties elected to the Knesset, or parliament, in hopes of finding a consensus on a candidate for prime minister. But neither Netanyahu, nor his main rival, Yair Lapid, received the endorsement of a majority of lawmakers.
As he announced his decision Tuesday, an anguished Rivlin said no candidate had the support needed to form a majority coalition in the 120-seat Knesset. He also noted that there are many misgivings about Netanyahu remaining in office while on trial.
Yet he said there was nothing in the law preventing Netanyahu from continuing as prime minister and said he believed that Netanyahu had a better chance than his rivals of cobbling together a coalition.
“This is not an easy decision on a moral and ethical basis,” Rivlin said. “The state of Israel is not to be taken for granted. And I fear for my country.”
Netanyahu did not attend Tuesday’s announcement, as is tradition, and later Rivlin did not appear with Netanyahu in the usual photo of the new parliament's swearing-in — moves local media interpreted as a show of the president's unhappiness with the situation.
Netanyahu now has an initial period of 28 days to put together a coalition, a period that Rivlin could extend for an additional two weeks.
Netanyahu has received the endorsement of 52 lawmakers, more than his rivals, but still short of the 61-seat majority needed to form a government.
Securing the support of nine more lawmakers will not be easy. Netanyahu will use his formidable powers of persuasion, coupled with generous offers of powerful government ministries, to court his potential partners.
Netanyahu will likely require the backing of Raam, a small Arab Islamist party. Raam’s leader, Mansour Abbas, has left the door open to cooperating with Netanyahu if he aids Israel’s Arab sector, which has long suffered from crime, discrimination and poverty.
But one of Netanyahu’s allies, the Religious Zionist party, has an openly racist platform and refuses to serve in a government with Arab partners. Netanyahu could appeal to the rabbis who serve as the party’s spiritual guides in hopes of changing minds.
Netanyahu will also likely need the support of Yamina, a religious nationalist party led by former ally turned rival, Naftali Bennett, who also has been cool to an alliance with Arab parties.
Bennett, a former aide to Netanyahu, promised Tuesday to negotiate in “good faith,” but made no promises to his former mentor.
Netanyahu’s last hope will be to try to lure “defectors” from other opposition parties. For now, however, Netanyahu’s opponents have vowed to stand firm, especially after the painful experience of the previous government.
Following elections last year, Netanyahu and his main rival at the time, Benny Gantz, agreed to an “emergency” government to confront the coronavirus crisis. Their partnership was plagued by infighting and collapsed in half a year, triggering the March 23 election.
“The chances of Netanyahu to form a government, as it seems right now, are quite low,” said Yohanan Plesner, president of the Israel Democracy Institute, a Jerusalem think tank.
Looming over the negotiations will be Netanyahu’s corruption trial, which resumed this week with testimony from the first of a string of witnesses to testify against him.
Netanyahu has been charged with fraud, breach of trust and accepting bribes in a series of scandals. He denies the charges and this week compared the case to “an attempted coup.”
Lapid, head of the centrist Yesh Atid party, acknowledged Tuesday that the law left Rivlin “no choice,” but nonetheless said that tapping Netanyahu was a “shameful disgrace that tarnishes Israel.”
Lapid has offered an alternative: a power-sharing arrangement with Bennett that would see the two men rotate between the prime minister’s job. They are expected to hold intense negotiations in the coming weeks.
Plesner, a former Knesset member, said the partnership between Bennett and Lapid has “a reasonable likelihood of materializing.”
Lapid would be able to deliver his key campaign promise of ousting Netanyahu, while Bennett, whose party has just seven seats, would be the first to be prime minister.
“For both of them, it’s a very lucrative deal,” Plesner said.
Gayil Talshir, a political scientist at Israel’s Hebrew University, said that Netanyahu’s opponents who share his hard-line ideology, including Bennett, would prefer to see him fail before banding together against him.
“Otherwise, they would’ve been thought of, from their own right-wing base perspective as traitors,” she said.
The new parliament takes office at a time of deep polarization in Israeli society. Last month’s election was seen as a referendum on Netanyahu’s divisive leadership style, and the result was continued deadlock.
Netanyahu’s supporters view him as a global statesman who is uniquely suited to leading the country. His opponents accuse him of pushing the country through repeated elections in hopes of producing a parliament that will grant him immunity from criminal prosecution.
In a sign of those divisions, about 100 protesters hoisted LGBT pride flags and a mock submarine in a noisy demonstration outside the Knesset as the new parliament was sworn in. The pride flags were aimed at the pro-Netanyahu Religious Zionists, whose members are openly homophobic, while the submarine points to a graft scandal involving the purchase of German subs.
As the new Knesset was sworn into office, Rivlin appealed for unity. It was the last time Rivlin will address such a gathering, and the outgoing president, who leaves office this summer, appeared emotional.
“If we do not learn and find a model of partnership that will allow us to live here together, out of mutual respect for each other, out of commitment to each other, and genuine solidarity, our national resilience will be in real danger,” he said.
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Israel is committing the crime of apartheid, new report says
Israeli authorities are “committing the crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution,” according to a major new 213-page report released Tuesday by global advocacy group Human Rights Watch. The organization argued that, in terms framed by existing international law, overarching Israeli policy toward Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem constituted an agenda to both maintain Jewish Israeli domination and systematically oppress Palestinians.
Beyond the all-but-dead “peace process” of the past few decades, the organization pointed to the inescapable and unequal reality that defines life for everyone living between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. “This is the most stark finding Human Rights Watch has ever reached on the conduct of Israeli authorities,” Omar Shakir, the organization’s Israel and Palestine director and the author of the report, told Today’s WorldView. “For too long, the international community has failed to recognize the reality on the ground for what it is.”
Shakir added that HRW is hardly alone in arriving at this conclusion.
For years, Palestinians have invoked apartheid in discussing the region’s status quo: where an Israeli military occupation governs over many aspects of their lives, where the security and political imperatives of the Israeli government curtail their own rights, and where the expansion of Jewish settlements inexorably entails further Palestinian dispossession.
The discrimination also extends to within Israel proper, where Israeli citizens of Palestinian descent have “a status inferior to Jewish citizens by law,” observed HRW. In the Palestinian territories, the weakness and dysfunction of the Palestinian Authority — which was meant only to be a transitional entity until Israel and Palestinian officials reached a more permanent settlement, but is now a bitterly unpopular institution that holds sway in parts of the occupied territories — does not absolve an Israeli government that effectively calls all the shots.
Many Israelis see this, too. “If we keep controlling the whole area from the Mediterranean to the river Jordan where some 13 million people are living … if only one entity reigned over this whole area, named Israel,” former prime minister Ehud Barak said in 2017, “it would become inevitably … either non-Jewish or nondemocratic.” In January, Israeli human rights group B’Tselem published a position paper arguing that the prevailing order in the country was that of an “apartheid regime,” whose program of supremacy has “gradually grown more institutionalized and explicit.”
Human Rights Watch is not arguing that Israel is an “apartheid state.” In its report, “A Threshold Crossed: Israeli Authorities and the Crimes of Apartheid and Persecution,” the organization waves away the need to summon direct parallels to South Africa, whose white-supremacist regime introduced “apartheid” to the world. Instead, it points to the salience of apartheid as a universal legal term codified in a number of international conventions, including the 1998 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.
“Laws, policies, and statements by leading Israeli officials make plain that the objective of maintaining Jewish Israeli control over demographics, political power, and land has long guided government policy,” noted the organization. “In pursuit of this goal, authorities have dispossessed, confined, forcibly separated, and subjugated Palestinians by virtue of their identity to varying degrees of intensity. In certain areas … these deprivations are so severe that they amount to the crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution.”
In a statement to Today’s WorldView, the Israeli Embassy in Washington described the report as “filled with lies” and personally attacked Shakir, a U.S. citizen who was expelled from Israel in 2019 following a legal battle that went all the way to the country’s highest court. “We strongly reject the false accusations that Human Rights Watch is spreading about Israel,” it said. “This is an organization known to have a long-standing anti-Israel agenda, actively seeking for years to promote boycotts against Israel.”
Shakir was accused of supporting boycotts against Israel in a case that saw Israeli authorities mine his social media accounts to uncover college-era activism from more than 15 years ago in which he called for divestment from companies that profit from Israel’s rule in the occupied territories. “In [Shakir’s] four years as an employee of Human Rights Watch, he said neither he nor the organization have advocated for boycotts against Israel or companies doing business here,” my colleagues reported at the time. “They do call on companies, including Airbnb, not to operate in Israeli settlements, which they characterize as violating international humanitarian law.”
Now, in invoking the crime of apartheid, Human Rights Watch hopes for far tougher international scrutiny of Israel. The report, among other things, calls for the creation of a U.N. commission to investigate systemic discrimination in Israel, asset freezes and sanctions on certain Israeli officials, and the conditioning of military and security assistance to Israel on the basis of its unwinding its policies that constitute “apartheid.”
Such action looks unlikely. For all the increasing partisan rancor in Washington over Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing government and its close dealings with former president Donald Trump, there’s little political will to shake up the Israeli-Palestinian status quo. Three-quarters of the U.S. House of Representatives, including a roughly even mix of Republicans and Democrats, recently signed a letter denouncing a proposed bill that would place additional regulations on U.S. aid to Israel.
But the conversation around Israel is clearly, if slowly, shifting in the United States. “This new HRW report raises critical concerns that should deeply trouble both supporters of Israel and those who care about Palestinian rights,” said Jeremy Ben-Ami, the president of J Street, a liberal pro-Israel advocacy organization in Washington that does not use the term “apartheid” to describe the Israeli context.
“The fact that the occupation inherently threatens Israel’s future as a democratic homeland for the Jewish people and involves the systematic deprivation of Palestinian rights simply cannot be ignored,” he told Today’s WorldView.
Reports suggest the Biden administration will not expend much political capital in an attempt to get the peace process back on track, though it has sought to undo some of the damage caused by Trump, including by resuming funding to the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees.
“Early indications from the Biden administration show this will not be a priority issue,” Shakir said. “But merely reversing 50 percent of what the Trump administration did” is insufficient. Some analysts argue that successive U.S. administrations, including Trump’s, allowed the steady erosion of any possibility of a “two-state solution” by turning a blind eye to Israeli settlement expansion and land grabs in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Meanwhile, Israeli politics have drifted further to the right. Various leading politicians clamor for outright annexation of areas of the West Bank, while a party of far-right extremists associated with a violent Jewish supremacist hate group could join the country’s next ruling coalition government.
Last week, at an event moderated by Today’s WorldView, experts convened by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace released a report calling on the Biden administration to prioritize human rights for every Palestinian and Israeli over the old paradigm of a peace process. “Instead of reviving a moribund peace process or simply abandoning U.S. engagement, President Joe Biden’s administration should place a rights-based approach at the center of its strategy,” they wrote.
But the longer equal rights for Palestinians get deferred, the larger the question of apartheid looms.
New Human Rights Watch report says Israel is committing the crime of apartheid - The Washington Post
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TEL AVIV, Israel (AP) — A turreted former Catholic girl's school in Jaffa is being transformed into an exclusive Soho House club. Around the corner, a historic ex-convent is now a five-star hotel. Across the street, the glittering towers of the Andromeda Hill luxury residences overlook the Mediterranean.
But farther down Yefet Street, working class Arabs of Jaffa's Ajami neighborhood face a starkly different reality. With housing prices out of reach, discontent over the city's rapid transformation into a bastion for Israel's ultra-wealthy is reaching a boiling point. The crisis has taken on nationalistic overtones, with some Arab residents accusing the government of trying to push them out to make way for Jews.
“Ninety percent of people here barely make a living, from hand to mouth, they don’t have enough to eat," said Jaffa resident Ibrahim Tartir. "For a young man looking to get married, it’s 5,000, 6,000 shekels ($1,800) for rent, not including water and electricity and the rest. How much does he earn? 6,000 a month. How can he live?”
Jaffa, the historic port at the core of the greater Tel Aviv metropolis, is home to around 20,000 Arab residents, remnants of the Palestinian population that lived there before Israel’s establishment in 1948. The district has undergone extensive gentrification in recent decades with government encouragement.
That trend has accelerated in the past several years as real estate prices have skyrocketed amid surging demand. As wealthy Israelis and foreigners move from other areas of Tel Aviv into Jaffa, its mostly working-class Arab residents have been pushed out. This has added ethnic tensions to an economic phenomenon familiar in other cities around the world.
“We’re reaching a point where Arab people can’t buy houses unless they are very rich,” said Youssef Masharawi, a Jaffa native and professor of physical therapy at Tel Aviv University. He said young Arabs in Jaffa have nowhere to go, unable to afford to start families in their hometown and facing discrimination in nearby Israeli cities with overwhelmingly Jewish populations.
The stress is starting to reach a breaking point.
Long smoldering tensions erupted last week after the rabbi and director of a pre-military religious seminary in the predominantly Arab neighborhood of Ajami were assaulted by two Arab residents while visiting an apartment for sale.
Moshe Schendowich, chief executive of the Meirim B’Yafo seminary, was injured in the incident. He said that while there have been some disagreements with Arab neighbors, those conflicts "should be solved with speech, with talking, not with violence.”
Although the seminary says it isn’t out to push anyone out, some residents view it with suspicion. Its head rabbi is a former West Bank settler and was formally affiliated with Ateret Cohanim, a group that takes over Arab properties in Jerusalem to make way for Jewish settlers. The yeshiva’s website says its aim is to “strengthen Jewish identity and the voice of the Torah, (and) strengthen communities” in Jaffa.
The incident ignited an already flammable situation. In the days following, Arab residents and Jewish supporters faced off against Jewish nationalist counter-protesters. The demonstrations devolved into clashes with police.
Tel Aviv-Jaffa Mayor Ron Huldai condemned the violence but insisted “what we are seeing is not a nationalist conflict between Jews and Arabs."
“It is the product of ongoing frustration of a whole generation of Jaffans that can’t continue to live there,” he said.
But in Israel, nationalist conflict is never far away.
Before Israel's establishment in 1948, Jaffa was a predominantly Arab city of some 100,000 people. During the war surrounding Israel's creation, tens of thousands of Palestinian residents fled or were forced from their homes.
Under a 1950 absentee property law, the new Israeli government confiscated thousands of empty properties and handed them to state-run public housing companies. Many of the Palestinians who remained in Jaffa ended up in these properties.
Since 2011, the Israeli government has pushed to sell off these properties to develop more housing. Although occupants are given an opportunity to buy these homes, the prices are often too high, forcing many longtime residents to move out.
Amidar, a public housing company that manages the buildings, said there is no intention to expel people. "The properties are offered for sale first to tenants at a significant discount and with professional guidance" and most are purchased by residents, it said.
Even with generous terms, however, many low-income residents cannot afford to buy their homes. Many properties have been bought up by developers, resulting in low-income Arab residents being forced out.
On Wednesday, Tel Aviv City Hall announced that it would be opening registration for an affordable housing lottery for 28 units in Jaffa for Arab residents.
“In addition to the project, approval has been granted for a public housing renewal program in Jaffa’s Ajami neighborhood,” city hall said in a statement. “The program will enable 100 existing tenants to remain in renovated properties while increasing supply by a further 200 apartments.”
Ravit Hananel, a professor of urban policy at Tel Aviv University, said the Israeli government has been ridding itself of public housing since the 1980s as it abandoned the country's socialist roots and adopted neo-liberal, capitalist policies.
She said the government pledged to address housing issues after mass social justice protests in 2011. But she said the response has been to push for more privatization, further hurting the disadvantaged.
While this is the case across the country, Jaffa’s rapid gentrification is not simply a case of rich against poor, said Abed Abou Shhadeh, a Tel Aviv city councilman from Jaffa.
“It has a national background behind it, and it’s part of the conflict,” said Abou Shhadeh.
While some try to depoliticize the issue, he said "it’s more than a class war. There’s a very deep rooted political tension happening at the same time, which makes it much more difficult to come with a fair and equal solution.”
Organizers of a recent protest wrote on Facebook that the “economic expulsion and gentrification that’s pushing the Arab community — and also poor Jewish residents — out of the city for the sake of real estate deals continues what was started in 1948." Graffiti on city walls say in Hebrew and Arabic: “Jaffa is not for sale.”
Masharawi, the Jaffa-born professor, called for the construction of affordable housing for young Arabs in Jaffa. He said he was determined to stand his ground against the rising tide of change.
“I will never leave Jaffa even if I am going to die within a small room in the end," he said. “This is my home, my house, my way of life.”
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you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
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Opinion: Sheikh Jarrah highlights the violent brazenness of Israel’s colonialist project
Noura Erakat is a human rights attorney and associate professor at Rutgers University. She is the author of “Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine.” Mariam Barghouti is a Palestinian writer and researcher based in Ramallah.
The young Palestinian writer Mohammed El-Kurd sits quietly in front of his laptop with a grin on his face, preparing for the launch of his most recent manuscript, “Rifqa.” He seems excited, anxious and afraid all at once, as he revises his poems and the paragraphs about his grandmother. She died at 103 defending her home from Israeli settlers who had already squatted in one part of it. El-Kurd seems to clutch onto his words in an attempt to ensure that the memory of his grandmother, of himself and his lineage, remains with him.
Some believe that what is documented cannot be lost, but El-Kurd’s calm is broken when we speak of his Jerusalem neighborhood, Sheikh Jarrah, where he and his sister Muna are now trying to highlight the grave violations happening there as they face forced eviction.
Sheikh Jarrah is now practically a war zone as armed Israeli settlers, under the protection of Israeli police, terrorize the Palestinian residents. These are the very settlers who are looking to kick out families, including El-Kurd’s.
Sheikh Jarrah is the latest flashpoint of Israel’s expansionist project. The threats of eviction are part of what Palestinians describe as their “ongoing Nakba,” because the removal and forced exile of 80 percent of historic Palestine’s native population between 1947 and 1949 was not a singular event. It is the same reality we saw in Khan al-Ahmar, and in Araqib before that, and it is how every settlement was solidified, from Tel Aviv in 1948 to the newer settlements of Maali Adumim and Givat Hamatos in the West Bank.
Zionist settlement remains an ongoing process that seeks to remove Palestinian natives and replace them with Jewish-Zionists. In Jerusalem, the forced removals echo throughout the West Bank, throughout Gaza and among Palestinians forcibly exiled in the global diaspora.
Israeli settlers, supported as they are by the United States and a nearly silent global community, are incredibly brazen in their ethnic-cleansing campaign. One settler matter-of-factly told Muna El-Kurd while she protested the theft of her home: “If I don’t steal it, someone else will.” Jerusalem Deputy Mayor Arieh King was caught on camera lamenting that a Palestinian men shot in the leg during protests wasn’t shot in the head. On Monday, Israeli police raided the al-Aqsa Mosque, one of Islam’s holiest sites, wounding hundreds of Palestinians who had sought shelter inside with rubber-tipped bullets and stun grenades.
Now a new generation has taken to social media, using the hashtag #SaveSheikhJarrah, to once again show Zionist settler violence to the rest of the world. But when the hashtag began to trend in recent days on social media platforms, many activists reported that their posts were being removed; accounts have also been suspended en masse. The apparent censorship of Palestinian protest on social media is another chapter in the months-long campaign urging Facebook not to flag anti-Zionism critique as anti-Semitic hate speech. Many pro-Israel groups are trying to use the empty charges of anti-Semitism to shut down debate about Palestine.
As May 15 marks the 73rd commemoration of the mass expulsion of Palestinians from cities such as Haifa, Tarshiha and Safad in 1948, let the world bear witness to Jerusalem today. This is how refugees are made, this is our ongoing Nakba. Our freedom struggle is not for a state but for belonging to the land, to remain on it, to keep our homes, to resist erasure. But somehow calling it by its name on social media, revealing to the world what has been happening for decades, seems more offensive than our ongoing displacement at gun point.
There’s no denying the reality: This is Zionist settler colonialism, where if one settler does not take our homes, another settler will. When will the world open its eyes to this injustice and respond appropriately? We do not need more empty both sides-isms, we need solidarity to overcome apartheid.
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WASHINGTON (AP) — The surge in Israeli-Palestinian violence has flummoxed the Biden administration in its first four months as it attempts to craft a Middle East policy it believes will be more durable and fairer than that of its predecessor.
Its early hesitation to wade more deeply into efforts to resolve the decades-long conflict has created a leadership vacuum that is exacerbated by political uncertainty in Israel and the Palestinian Authority, each of which is clamoring for outside support and unhappy with America’s new determination to toe a middle line.
Israelis and Palestinians alike have denounced the Biden administration's call for all sides to step back following clashes between Israeli security forces and Palestinians in east Jerusalem that escalated into rocket attacks on Israel from the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip and retaliatory strikes from Israel’s military.
“The US State Department message is not acceptable to me,” Israel’s ambassador to the United States, Gilad Erdan, said on Twitter. “It is impossible to put in the same message statements by Israeli leaders who call for calm alongside instigators and terrorist organizations that launch missiles and rockets.”
On the Palestinian side, there is frustration that the U.S. has slow-walked a U.N. Security Council statement that it sees as too unfavorable to Israel.
“The continued paralysis of the Security Council on the situation in Palestine is unacceptable,” the Palestinian ambassador to the United Nations, Riyad Mansour, said Tuesday. “The international community, particularly the Security Council, must condemn all of Israel’s illegal actions.”
Advocates for both sides say the administration appears to be pursuing an interim strategy that lacks coherence and sends mixed messages to the parties, neither of which has shown a willingness to listen or to back down.
The administration, unsurprisingly, has rejected that criticism.
“It is not that we failed to prioritize this,” State Department spokesman Ned Price said Tuesday, after giving a brief description of a call between Secretary of State Antony Blinken and his Israeli counterpart. “The United States is doing what we can knowing that our ability in certain situations is going to be in some cases limited."
President Joe Biden won initial but cautious plaudits from Mideast analysts when he rejected the Trump administration’s unabashedly pro-Israel stance and tentatively embraced the Palestinians by restoring aid and diplomatic contacts.
Yet the Biden administration has also retained key elements of President Donald Trump’s policies, including several that broke with long-standing U.S. positions on Jerusalem and the legitimacy of Israeli settlements that the Palestinians believe are manifestly biased against them. The administration has said little would be accomplished with immediate, wholesale shifts in Israel-Palestinian policy
At the same time, Israelis fear that even subtle shifts away from Trump’s hard line on the Palestinians and Biden’s determination to re-enter the Iran nuclear deal represent a direct threat to its security even as the administration seeks to build on Trump-era Israeli-Arab normalization accords.
“The parties have basically been conditioned over the past four years,” said former U.S. Mideast negotiator Aaron David Miller, who served under both Republican and Democratic administrations. “The Trump sugar high for the Israelis and the vinegar high for the Palestinians have created a certain set of expectations that this administration hasn’t addressed.”
The administration has not yet named an ambassador to Israel nor indicated that it will appoint a special envoy for peacemaking. By contrast, Trump’s nomination of an ambassador to Israel was one of his earliest appointments, announced more than a month before inauguration, and President Barack Obama chose former Sen. George Mitchell to serve as his Middle East peace envoy on his second day in office.
“I realize the administration has lowballed and deprioritized the Middle East and Israeli-Palestinian issue. But the lack of an ambassador to Israel and a consul general in Jerusalem is a serious problem during a crisis," Miller said.
Some Democrats and other progressives are also voicing frustration.
“The United States must call for an immediate cease-fire and an end to provocative and illegal settlement activity. And we must also recommit to working with Israelis and Palestinians to finally end this conflict,” Sen. Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent, said in a statement.
While it has categorically condemned Hamas rocket attacks on Israel and backed Israel’s absolute right to self-defense, the Biden administration has been yet either unwilling or unable to say whether the Palestinians meet the criteria to enjoy that same right of self-defense. It has also not modified long-held U.S. policy that the Palestinians are ineligible to take their grievances to the International Criminal Court because they are not a state.
This apparent contradiction, along with what the Palestinians consider to be a weak response to Israel's threatened evictions of Palestinian families from east Jerusalem that were a proximate cause of the latest tensions, have frustrated those looking for a new U.S. approach.
They note that the Biden administration, through a White House statement, has made clear that it believes “Palestinians and Israelis deserve equal measures of freedom, security, dignity and prosperity.”
“We're still waiting to see equal measures of empathy,” said Zaha Hassan, a visiting fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the lead author of a report it issued last month titled “Breaking the Israel-Palestine Status Quo.” “The administration needs to recognize that Palestinian rights need to be respected.”
Hassan and others have urged the administration to stop resisting international attempts to put pressure on Israel, like stalling a U.N. Security Council statement condemning the violence. Although it won't win Biden friends in Israel, "it will shore up U.S. credibility around the world and obviously with the Palestinians,” Hassan said.
___
EDITOR'S NOTE — AP Diplomatic Writer Matthew Lee has covered the State Department and U.S. foreign policy since 1999.
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
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(3600) Buildings collapse as Israel carries out hundreds of airstrikes in Gaza - YouTube
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