The High Court of Justice had some sharp words for one settler who invaded private Palestinian lands and then perverted the law to prove they were his. So why did the prosecution close the case for ‘lack of public of interest?’

By Yesh Din, written by Yossi Gurvitz

Several years ago – the precise date is disputed – a settler by the name of Michael Lessens began invading private Palestinian lands in the village of Qaddum (near his settlement of Kedumim), and fenced them for his private needs. As Lessens would later explain, he wasn’t acting on his own initiative; he received directions from the council of Kedumim to seize and till the lands, so that the settlement may later expand onto them. In documents which would come before the High Court of Justice, and which were originally presented to the Civil Administration’s appeals committee at the Ofer Military Court, Lessens stated that he had council officials sign documents allowing the land grab.

In 2007, Lessens began fencing the lands, that is, he attempted to stake his claim and prevent the legal owners from accessing them. The result was a legal process in which the owners of the lands were represented by Yesh Din’s legal team. At the same time, the police began an investigation against Lessens and others on suspicion of criminal trespassing. At first, Yesh Din turned to the chief of the Civil Administration, who ordered Lessens to stop using the lands. Lessens appealed, showing the appeals committee statements saying he was instructed to take over the lands. The committee accepted the appeal in a majority vote. However, the chief of the Civil Administration rejected the decision, ruling that the eviction order against Lessens is valid. Lessens, in response, appealed to the High Court, which was also dealing with an appeal by the residents of Qaddum, represented by Yesh Din, who demanded Lessens’s eviction.

Lessens had the nerve to claim that since he held the lands for more than a decade, that according to Ottoman land law – or  Lessens’s perverted version of it – the lands belong to him by virtue of possession and tilling. The High Court rejected Lessens’s appeal on March 30, 2012, and accepted the petition of the residents of Qaddum. The court had some choice words for Lessens:

One part of the case ended well: Lessens was evicted from the lands he occupied in...

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The Prawer-Begin Plan is not the first time the state has displaced Bedouins in the Naqab (Negev). But it is a sign of how, 65 years after the state’s establishment, Israel still treats thousands of its Palestinian citizens no differently than those in the territories.

By Amjad Iraqi

On April 25, a bus carrying Bedouin residents of Al-Araqib drove from the Naqab (Negev) in Israel to the Palestinian village of Susiya in the West Bank. The people were meeting for the first time to watch a screening of a new film by Adalah (the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel), documenting the two villages’ stories of eviction and violence by Israeli authorities and Jewish civilians.

Al-Araqib and Susiya epitomize the injustice experienced by thousands of Palestinian Arabs both inside Israel and the occupied West Bank. Although they live on opposite sides of the border, the two villages are targets of the same Israeli policy of forced displacement. The destruction of homes, police and settler violence, and denial of basic services are all employed by the state to drive these villagers off their land.

Even in Israel proper, the legal structures that are supposed to defend Arab citizens from such discrimination are erased by the state’s belief that Arab rights can be violated at any time in order to maintain superior rights for Jews. Because of this ideology, the displacement of Palestinians is carried out with no regard for citizenship or human rights on either side of the border – as if the Green Line does not exist.

The last week alone has shown that this practice is pervasive and continuing. Political parties in the Israeli government are eagerly preparing their plans to demolish unrecognized Bedouin villages in the Naqab as harshly as possible. The Jaradat family in Jerusalem lost their homes to Israeli bulldozers after years of the municipality rejecting their requests for permits. The Adei Ad outpost demonstrated the creeping dispossession and theft of occupied lands and their damage to Palestinian livelihoods. Israeli citizenship, Jerusalemite status and Palestinian residency failed to protect these Arabs from the same discriminatory...

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The time has come to allow ourselves to see this country not only as the battleground of a national struggle but as a shared homeland, which with painful concessions and tremendous confidence-building efforts on both sides, we can turn into a good place where our children will want to live.

By Ron Gerlitz

As Israel’s Jewish citizens celebrated the Passover holiday last month, its Arab citizens commemorated Land Day. Land Day is a commemoration of the death of six Arab demonstrators in 1976 while protesting massive government land expropriations in the Galilee for the purpose of building new Jewish communities. It has also become a day of protest against discrimination and inequality.

Coverage of Land Day events in Israel’s Hebrew-language media was very limited and reported only on the demonstrations; it ignored the content of the day and the demands being made by Arab citizens. This seems to attest to the the Jewish majority’s reluctance to make a genuine effort at dealing forthrightly with Arab citizens on land issues.

Almost 40 years after the Land Day events, an examination of government policy toward Arab citizens reveals a complex picture. Alongside prolonged and systematic discrimination that encompasses almost all aspects of state allocations, there has also been a positive trend that includes a government effort to close gaps between the Jewish and Arab sectors in certain areas. This effort has been translated into government programs that have led to somewhat of an improvement in Arab citizens’ socio-economic situation. The pace of narrowing gaps is excruciatingly slow, but there is great potential in this positive trend.

But in one area, the state has demonstrated almost total refusal to bring about change, namely the land issue. It is important to recap the background: Immediately after the establishment of the state in 1948 there was a massive expropriation of land belonging to internal refugees, who became landless citizens. Later on, until the 1970s, the state expropriated large amounts of land in order to develop Jewish communities.

Since 1948, the two groups’ populations have grown at similar rates (eightfold to tenfold) but the government has built 700 (!) new communities for Jews (including new cities) and not...

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When Israeli politicians talk about land swaps, they rarely consider the rights of those affected – or at least the Palestinian ones. As personal as it is political, the entire situation shows the lack of civil discourse in so-called peace negotiations.

By Muhammad Jabali

I will never forget that night at a birthday party in Jaffa when a drunken friend began approaching guests with the question: “What’s your address as registered at the Interior Ministry?” He then joked that everyone should change their residency to Tel Aviv as soon as possible before they find themselves on the other side of the separation wall, suffering segregation in the West Bank.

Those who answered “Nazareth,” or anywhere in the Galilee, were met with humorous replies: “Oh, you’re okay, your turn hasn’t come yet!” Next, he demanded that the bunch of us from Taybeh, Tira, Umm al-Fahm and other parts of the Triangle region show our ID cards. After checking where we were registered, he declared those who had already changed their addresses to Tel Aviv-Jaffa or Haifa were “the smart ones.” Anyone who was still registered in our hometowns and villages was told: “I’m checking your IDs next week and I want them to read ‘Tel Aviv’ or ‘Haifa.’ I’m not even gonna make the effort to visit you if it involves crossing checkpoints and separation walls.” Without a doubt it was the joke of the night. Our kind of black humor.

The background was this: earlier that same day, Shimon Peres had made some kind of statement about the possibility of exchanging the Arab Triangle region – a mainly Palestinian-populated area inside Israel – for the “settlements blocs” in a future agreement with the PA. That was six or seven years ago. Today, such proposals have become a relatively common part of various proposed “resolutions” for the conflict; some are short-term plans, some are designs for a “final resolution.” Each plan has its own definition of what constitutes the West Bank and what level of independence the almighty and generous Israel grants the Palestinians “over there” in the West Bank. Territorial swaps and population exchanges have clearly become a routine part of the terminology used by a wide range of politicians, from Avigdor Lieberman to Tzipi .

I couldn’t help but think of that birthday party while taking the train from Kfar Saba to Tel Aviv last Wednesday to DJ at my...

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Even if bringing the Herodium exhibit to the Israel Museum is not identical to wielding physical violence against Palestinians, it seems that in everything that pertains to the West Bank, those in charge exploit resources for their own needs, be it for exhibition or settlement expansion. 

By Yonatan Mizrachi

The exhibition “Herod the Great – The King’s Final Journey” is the largest archaeological exhibit ever showcased at the Israel Museum. In order to stage the exhibit, 30 tons of archaeological findings were transferred from the sites at Herodium and Jericho. The tremendous investment led to a successful portrayal of the glory of Roman culture, identified with the days of King Herod. Museum director James Snyder was careful to explain that exporting the findings into Israel from Herodium and Jericho, located in the West Bank, was carried out legally, and in accordance with the Oslo Accords.

In another location, ostensibly without any connection to the above-mentioned case, the Tel Aviv University Institute of Archaeology decided to conduct excavations in the East Jerusalem village of Silwan, at a site known as “City of David.” Even before excavations began, the archaeologists and their spokespersons declared that work would be conducted in accordance with scientific guidelines and would not contribute to strengthening the settlements in East Jerusalem.

According to today’s international standards, heritage sites are not a national possession, but rather part of a place’s history, and as such, must be accessible to residents and remain under their jurisdiction. However, the prohibition on the removing findings from occupied territories enshrined in international law, and the Oslo Accords, under which archaeological sites in Area C are to be transferred to the Palestinian Authority, have long become meaningless in the Israeli discourse.

Both Tel Aviv University and the Israel Museum are fastidious in presenting their activity as separate from the “unpleasant” deeds and sights of the occupation. The university claims that the violence, arrests, land theft and house demolitions in Silwan are completely unrelated to the excavations that it conducts there, as if the excavations constitute a spiritual bubble of positivity in the heart of a contested and wounded land. The museum even went to great lengths to declare that the findings transferred from Herodium and Jericho will be returned immediately...

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In a recent article, seasoned veteran of the Zionist Left Uri Avnery claimed that the influx of Russian-speaking immigrants to Israel, living in self-imposed ghettos, is what pushed the country to the right politically. Lia Tarachansky counters that the Russian-speaking community never ‘mingled’ with other Israelis because it was never invited to do so, and that Avnery is ignoring the many contributions the immigrants made to the country.

By Lia Tarachansky

I was born in Kiev into a shifting, uncertain reality. While I was only learning to read, my parents split, the Chernobyl nuclear reactor blew up and the Soviet Union collapsed. I was too young to understand what was happening when we evacuated the city and prepared for what would turn into years of economic devastation.

One night my mother woke my sister and I and told us to pack only what we absolutely couldn’t live without because we were moving to Israel. She told us Tel Aviv was lined with promenades where banana-eating monkeys sit in palm trees and that there we will no longer be “The Jews” because in Israel, everyone is Jewish.

In typical Soviet paranoia we weren’t allowed to tell anyone we were leaving. When we finally made it to the Romanian border after days on the train, we were stripped of our citizenship and promised we will never set foot again in the land where my parents and grandparents were born. My mother didn’t care. To this day she remains a dedicated Zionist even after learning that monkeys don’t sit in palm trees, that not only Jews live in Israel, and that indeed we are not all free.

I went from being the only Jew in my Soviet kindergarten to being the only Russian in my Israeli elementary school. My mother went from being a computer engineer to changing diapers in a retirement home. In the Soviet Union we were hated because of our “piatii punkt” or “fifth clause” after the first and last name, date and place of birth; our nationality clause would read “Jew” on our identity documents. This is why the cynicism that dominates our community...

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For years, Israeli police and the Shin Bet have complained that they can’t deal with ‘price tag’ attacks. Here’s a simple proposition.

By Yesh Din, written by Yossi Gurvitz

The phenomenon of “price tag” attacks has been with us for some seven years now, and during this period, Israeli authorities have failed utterly in dealing with them. Time and time again, we are told by the police and the Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) that we’re dealing with an ultra-sophisticated group, which cannot be penetrated.

A new report in this genre was broadcast on Tuesday on Channel 10 (Hebrew). The police and Shin Bet seem to have made a great effort, if not in getting their hands on the terrorists, then at least in massaging their image: the reporter, the very able and honest Roey Sharon, received a copy of an internal Shin Bet document, as well as footage of detectives capturing “price tag” attackers red-handed.

No Shin Bet or police representative was quoted, but former General Avi Mizrahi spoke at length, saying you simply cannot recruit these guys as informers. Mizrahi bemoaned the fact that price taggers are irresponsible people who can easily set the entire sector on fire. You don’t say. Maybe Mizrahi ought to have thought about that when, as commander of the Central Command, he agreed to attend a ceremony honoring Dov Lior (the latter is considered to be one of the most extreme rabbis around, and at the time was wanted by the police for failing to show up for interrogation). If Mizrahi – a uniformed officer, and in fact the “stand-in for the sovereign” of the West Bank – decided to honor the man who penned his agreement with the Torat Ha’Melekh book, how seriously should his commitment to fighting price tag terror be taken?

We are told that the Shin Bet and the police have a hard time gathering human intelligence (HUMINT) among price taggers. That’s probably true. Then...

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While it will be a long wait for a safe consensus about this issue to emerge in Israel or in America, we need to treat the prospect of the end of the two-state solution as the five-alarm fire that it is. The question is whether the American administration has the political will to engage in muscular diplomacy.

By Ken Winikur and Ben Avishai

Addressing young Israelis in Jerusalem on March 21, 2013, President Obama discussed the imperative to reach a just peace with the Palestinians. Speaking like a community organizer, Obama laid out the challenge: “Political leaders will never take risks if the people do not push them.” It was a noble idea, but since then, those who agree have been left with a question: how?

The art of mobilizing citizens into action, of creating a voice that politicians actually hear, is the central theme a documentary we are making about J Street, the five-year old pro-Israel, pro-peace American-Jewish lobby group. J Street emerged shortly after Obama took office, rallying people from living rooms and synagogue basements across the U.S. around the progressive idea that to be pro-Israel means supporting a two-state solution, and that American involvement is crucial to making that happen. Its leaders soon found that the new administration was listening: when Obama convened an advisory session of Jewish leaders, he invited J Street founder and president, Jeremy Ben-Ami. And at J Street’s first national conference, National Security Advisor Jim Jones told a rapt audience that if he could solve any problem in the world, Israel-Palestine would be it.

We began filming J Street during the organization’s second year, curious to see if the it could make a difference. For the past three years, we have tracked its growth and witnessed its attempts to harness grassroots power to affect policy in Washington. J Street’s efforts have exposed a debate raging in the American Jewish community about how the U.S. government should act towards Israel, and have debunked the notion that American Jews are ideologically monolithic about that relationship. Criticized by the Right and the Left, we’ve watched as J Street has hunted for that elusive center – the sweet spot from which it...

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The reality of the Nordic economic model has little to do with the derisive way it is described by the ‘The Marker’ or ‘The Economist.’ One writer takes apart the right-wing business media’s analysis, revealing the truth behind the successful social democracies.

By: Ami Vatury (Translated from Hebrew by Rachel Beitarie)

“The Scandinavian model” found in Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Finland is exactly what the social left [1] says it is. It is an economic model based on large, strong, democratic trade unions; considerable involvement of the unions in management; a large public sector (relative to other countries); high taxes and high public spending, as well as considerable job security both on a country-wide level, as well as by workplace.

So why does The Marker [2] and its role-model, The Economist, heap praises for a model so in conflict with their own values? Because they have no other choice. Their favored economic model, based on a “small” government, low taxes and a market-above-all approach, has been exposed with the global financial crisis. Members of the public, some of them from what liberals in Israel like to call “the middle class,” have come to realize that the system does not work, or at least it does not work for them. In other places, such as the U.S. and the U.K., people are waking from the delusion that capitalism serves them well.

This happened, among other reasons, thanks to a freer flow of information that exposes people to a more fair system found in the Scandinavian countries, along with the fact that those countries still maintain their unique, successful model (they were not the ones to collapse during the last crisis, despite doomsayers on the right envisaging their downfall for decades). So what do you do with the Scandinavian model? Try to present it as something other than what it really is – appropriate it.

Turning social democracy into capitalism

The Scandinavian model consists of all the basics of good old social democracy. What’s more, both the Swedish Social Democratic Party and Norway’s Labor Party define themselves as anti-capitalist parties. Lucky for The Economist and The Marker though, the Scandinavian model isn’t built upon solely one component. It is a complex model comprised of many complementary factors. Naturally, there are also some differences between the four Scandinavian countries.

Looking at texts that have appeared on both these publications regarding the...

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One Palestinian journalist’s meditation on being forced to pay for Haaretz, the only paper he can rely on, but one that also espouses a nationalist ideology he cannot accept. ‘I’m fated to be a reluctant reader — and a reluctant citizen.’

By Hakim Bishara

It’s morning and I desperately need the news. Where I live, one needs to know what awful things to expect outdoors before leaving the house. I often think of those people who have a favorite newspaper of choice. They develop an easy kinship to the paper: “Have you seen my newspaper?”, they ask around the house; “I’m here, just reading my newspaper”, they shout from the garden. They meet their favorite paper every morning expecting it to inform, enlighten and at times amuse them. True, they might be critical of some writers, alert to some trends, but in general they trust their paper. If it is a serious relationship, they subscribe. That way, mornings are never completely bleak and coffee is never lonely. And isn’t that nice? How I envy them, those people who look forward to leafing through the Sunday paper or casually entering their favorite news website during the day, just to check what’s happening.

It’s morning, and I need a source to rely on. Without much thought, I type my way into the Israeli Haartez news website. Yes, I’m a Palestinian, but I live in Israel and I need to know the inner workings of the political and social structures here. Nevertheless, the task of jigsawing a fundamental — however relative — truth falls solely on my shoulders. How can I possibly trust the Israeli news? But then again, how can I do without them? Relying only on the local Arab press, poor, bitter and disenfranchised, is below the needs of my disposition. You cannot fully perform the role of the victim while living in the belly of the beast. So, it is morning and I enter the Haaretz website, “The paper for thinking people,” as its slogan reads. But what has long become a default choice, a habitual and involuntary tapping of my fingers on the keyboard, is now blocked by an unequivocal...

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Since the founding of the State of Israel, the Ashkenazi elite has suppressed the Mizrahi culture Jews from Arab countries brought with them. But almost without us noticing, those who led the Zionist project also erased whatever was left of the Ashkenazi traditions from Eastern Europe.

By Edan Ring / Café Gibraltar

Family Day was no different from any other holiday. On this day, too, we received an assignment from our daughter’s kindergarten teacher. Only this time, we were slightly embarrassed. As part of the Family Day (formerly known as the Israeli version of Mother’s Day) celebrations, the kindergarten hosted a big meal, in which every parent was asked to bring an “ethnic dish” that is traditionally made in each home. At first thought, no “ethnic dish” came to either my nor my partner’s mind. After some more thought, we came to the conclusion that neither of us has any culinary tradition that was passed down to us from our grandparents’ homes. Of course, when I was young I ate gefilte fish, matzo breit and kugel on holidays. After my grandmother’s death, however, very little was left of this tradition, which, in any case, took place only once or twice a year. Tradition cannot be summarized only in terms of food, but also in other areas: most descendants of Eastern European Jews will have a hard time finding ways of reconnecting to their past.

I see young Mizrahim around me celebrating and reviving their ancestral cultures. Shortly after the events of Family Day at the kindergarten, I took part in the launch of the new Cafe Gibraltar website. The young Adi Keissar moved me with her words:

“My grandmother loved me with her heavy accent, with her Yemenite talk which I could never understand. As a girl I remember how I feared being alone with her, concerned that I would not understand what she was saying.”

I always understood my grandmother, but mostly because she did not talk much. She was a simple woman, the mother of my father, who, as everyone always said, “could not speak three languages.” As a young Pole, she fled Europe before the Holocaust and arrived in Montevideo,...

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Security forces are targeting Israeli activists and Palestinian shephards in new ways in the South Hebron hills. It’s as if they’d decided to circumvent the whole irksome apparatus of the courts and to resort instead to brute force. It’s much simpler, and maybe more effective. 

By David Shulman

Today we have the New Rules. In some respects they’re rather like the Old Rules. The aim and sole rationale remain the same: dispossession, expulsion, taking more land. The army has, it seems, given up on its favorite device of declaring Closed Military Zones, week after week; perhaps the outright illegality of this practice ended up causing them too many problems in court. Instead, the soldiers simply chase us — Palestinian shepherds, farmers, Israeli activists—physically away, pushing, shoving, threatening, beating. They also have decided they won’t allow us to document their crimes on film; as soon as we start filming, they rush at us and block our cameras with their cell phones. It’s as if they’d decided to circumvent the whole irksome apparatus of the courts and to resort instead to brute force. It’s much simpler, and maybe more effective.

At the same time, there’s been a wave of further annexations. The settlers are paving new roads, which become de facto boundaries, far beyond the settlements’ periphery. Plots of land that the Palestinian owners have worked for some years, or have reclaimed, often with our help, have been declared “in dispute” — which means that settlers have access to them, but the rightful owners don’t. All over South Hebron there are attempts from above and from below to roll back the gains we’ve made in recent years. Probably officers in the Civil Administration have been devising creative schemes. And there have been the usual, routine detentions, harassments, lethal threats, arrests — more, in fact much more, than before. Add to this a wave of pure nit-picking and pestering, for example by handing out tickets to activists, Israeli and Palestinian, for absurd traffic violations; several of our people have recently been fined large amounts for crossing the road while not on a marked pedestrian crossing. Remember we’re...

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By Idan Landau

A certain air of nostalgia dominated Maariv’s headline last Thursday: “Due to criticism in the world, IDF parts ways with white phosphorus”: just like the old Galil assault rifle and the old two-way radios that generations of soldiers grew familiar with. A couple of years ago we learned the IDF was giving up its cans of preserved meat (the kosher version of SPAM). Now, it’s white phosphorus that we say goodbye to.

[Twilight. The IDF and white phosphorus exchange a final gaze. A sad violin tune is heard. Curtain down.]

So the IDF is looking for a replacement for the white phosphorus bombs. A senior officer in the ground forces explained: “As we learned during Cast Lead, it [white phosphorus] doesn’t photograph well, so we are reducing the supply and we will not purchase beyond what we already have.”

“It doesn’t photograph well.” In all honesty, the man is right.

This item caught me by surprise. The IDF is giving up white phosphorus? Wait a minute; the IDF never used white phosphorus during Cast Lead. So how exactly do you give up something you never had? Chemical weapons are something the Syrians use, no?

Okay, after a while the army did remember that it had been confused, and it did use white phosphorus, but only in open territories and not against people.

Okay, then the IDF remembered that it got it wrong again and that it did use white phosphorus in urban areas. Two hundred bombs, actually. But this was only in order to create a “smoke screen,” and there is nothing wrong with that. And if there was something wrong, it’s insignificant and unintentional, and it would be thoroughly investigated, so that no stone is left unturned.

That’s all well and good, except that at least 12 Gazans met their horrific death this way, burned to death by white phosphorus. Among them were three women, six children and a 15-month-old baby girl. Dozens more suffered burns from the material which continues to burn through flesh and tissue until it reaches the bone. Doctors in Gaza were helpless in treating the unfamiliar burns. Israel didn’t give them time to prepare themselves; white phosphorus shells hit Al-Quds Hospital and completely burned the top two floors.

These facts were already known in the first days of Cast Lead. Human Rights Watch published...

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