A group photo of the 33rd Israeli government, March 19, 2013 (Avi Ohayon, GPO)

Economy Minister and Jewish Home Chairman Naftali Bennett is the latest MK to join a robust list of Israeli government coalition members who have publicly stated that the two-state solution is dead and that the notion of a Palestinian state is a thing of the past. Although it’s no new position for him, Bennett is making it clear that no matter what Prime Minister Netanyahu says or what polls show, the Israel of 2013 is squarely against a two-state solution.

Bennett stated that ”the idea of forming a Palestinian state in Israel has reached a dead end,” speaking at a settler council meeting Monday morning, comparing the “Palestinian problem” to a “piece of shrapnel” lodged in someone’s rear end; that one needs to learn to live with a pain in the ass rather than surgically remove it and risk becoming disabled.

Bennett also asserted there is no occupation, since Israeli Jews cannot be occupiers in their own home (echoing the Netanyahu-commissioned Levy Report from nearly a year ago that concluded there is no occupation) and called on Israel to annex Area C of the West Bank. This is similar to what Likud MK and former Knesset speaker Reuven Rivlin said last year: “Today, almost 20 years since Oslo, one could clearly argue that the idea of separating between the nations has failed … Between the Jordan River and the sea, there can only be one state, Jewish and democratic, with a solid Jewish majority.”

There are plenty of other coalition members who have publicly come out against the two-state solution and the possibility of a viable Palestinian state, as a Knesset committee meeting on the subject exposed last month. It’s not just fundamentalist Hebron settler Orit Struck from Jewish Home, who said two states are ”not part of the government’s guiding principles, and for good reason.”

MK Yoni Chetboun, also from Jewish Home, said at that meeting that, “the government has not even decided that it supports two nations for two peoples.” He is also the MK who publicly accused the Obama administration of boycotting Ariel University in the West Bank when the student body was not invited to his Jerusalem speech in March.

MK Ofer Shelah, from Yair Lapid’s Yesh Atid party, said recently that Israel will become an apartheid state if it does not pull out of the West Bank and called the occupation “corrupt.” Yet two of his party members – Pnina Tamano-Shata and Dov Lipman - attended the launch of the Knesset pro-settlement caucus a few days ago, which is committed to “bolstering the legal status of the Jewish people in the entire Land of Israel” and “rectifying the grave mistake of the disengagement [from Gaza] and preventing its recurrence.” Knesset Speaker Yuli Edelstein also attended the event.

Yair Lapid isn’t any better. His declaration that there will be no compromise on Jerusalem and no settlement freeze is pretty much as good as saying no to a two-state solution.

Likud of course has its fair share of anti-two-staters who openly oppose establishment of a Palestinian state. Likud MK Tzipi Hotovely, at the start of this year said the two-state solution is an “illusion.” Just the other day, Likud MK and Deputy Minister Ofir Akunis said settlements are actually good for peace and followed it up with the declaration that “Palestinians are not ready for statehood.”

Deputy Defense Minister from Likud Danny Danon takes the cake with his statement last week that the government will block any chance of a two-state solution and that any efforts at negotiations are futile. (MK Ahmed Tibi rightly said Danon is the most honest in the coalition as he at least does not hide Israel’s plans.)

Likud MK and Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon said in Washington a few days ago that the Arab Peace Initiative (for a two-state solution along 1967 borders in exchange for normalized relations with the Arab world) is just “a spin.”

As for Likud chairman, Prime Minister and acting Foreign Minister Netanyahu, he has himself said Israel must reach an agreement with Palestinians to avoid becoming a binational state and that a “demilitarized’ Palestinian state could be established. So Netanyahu is in fact – as far as the political rhetoric goes – the most moderate of the bunch. Scary. Though an official in his office just stated just the other day that in fact the government “has no official position on the Palestinian issue.”

And we mustn’t forget Justice Minister-cum-chief Israeli negotiator Tzipi Livni of Hatnuah, one of the last ministers in the governing coalition still publicly invoking a two-state solution as the only way to keep Israel Jewish. But considering her work environment, she cannot be seen as much more than a fig leaf for this government.

By Mairav Zonszein and Lisa Goldman

This article was originally published on the Daily Beast’s Open Zion blog on June 14, 2013.

A roller coaster at the Superland amusement park (Superland.co.il)

Imagine that Six Flags Great Adventure, a New Jersey adventure park, quietly instituted separate days for black and white schoolchildren. Exposed by the media, the management claimed they had acted in response to complaints from some white parents about the behavior of the black children, saying they behaved badly and cursed at the white children. Senior government ministers, including President Obama, said they were outraged and suggested the incident merited an official investigation. And then a white person wrote an op-ed defending the Six Flags management’s decision. In an article saturated with links and references to right-wing media outlets like Fox News, the Washington Free Beacon and the Drudge Report, the white author claimed that Six Flags’ policy was not racist. And the New York Times published the piece.

A variation of this scenario happened in Israel recently, when local media exposed the Superland amusement park’s policy of segregating Arab and Jewish schoolchildren. The mainstream media and the government, including right-wing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, were outraged. But Shmuel Rosner, a journalist who lives in Tel Aviv, defended the management’s policy in an op-ed for the New York Times, on the International Herald Tribune‘s Latitudes Blog. According to Rosner, the policy is not an expression of racism, but rather pragmatism that reflects a regrettable reality.

Rosner explains that Superland’s management is just trying to “prevent trouble” between Jewish and Arab kids who behave badly toward one another. This is the same argument that elite American universities like Harvard made for imposing quotas on Jewish students as recently as 50 years ago. The deans justified their policy by explaining that letting a department fill up with Jews would exacerbate anti-semitism, so by limiting the number of Jewish students they were actually protecting them.

Rosner cites statistics showing that a majority of Israel’s Palestinian-Arab citizens see the country as a “foreign imprint in the Middle East” and that “more than half of Israel’s Jews were ‘not ready to have an Arab neighbor‘.” Leaving aside the relevance of these polls to schoolchildren out for a day at an amusement park, one would think the lesson to draw from such expressed hostilities is that much more needs to be done to impart respect, tolerance and equal rights. But Rosner makes no such case. Instead, he is content to conclude that when it comes to Arabs and Jews, “the mix can be a recipe for trouble.”

Given this logic, we wonder how Rosner can reconcile Israel’s existence in the Middle East and, more specifically, in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, where several hundred thousand Jews choose to “mix” with the existing Palestinian population. Perhaps he also supports the systemic discrimination against Arab citizens of Israel, who are allocated far fewer resources and job opportunities than Jews, as a means of perpetuating the separation of Jews and Arabs. Is he also a supporter of the state-funded Orthodox rabbis who called on Jewish landlords not to rent or sell to Arabs, or of the Israeli ad hoc groups that organize to prevent Jews from marrying Arabs? After all, we can’t have them mixing—there might be trouble.

As Rosner himself admits, Superland’s management did not create the “mutual contempt” and “tribal sensitivities” that informs their policy. But maybe a good starting point for dealing with these trends is to condemn the practice of segregation that has clearly become normalized in Israeli society. Instead of combating such discrimination, Rosner has chosen to manage it — and to justify it.

Related:
‘Superland’ and the normalization of segregation in Israel
West Bank and East Jerusalem buses are already segregated

… [Akunis asserted] that past experience has shown that a halt to construction has only driven the Palestinians away from negotiating with Israel. “The Likud policy is very consistent. Our call to the Palestinians to enter into direct peace negotiations without precondition is in effect,” he said. (Emphasis mine)

Akunis, the same Likud lawmaker who in the last Knesset proposed a bill to limit all foreign funding for “political organizations” and who said on TV in 2011 that Senator Joe McCarthy was right, essentially stated – as I can only deduce from his backwards statement – that the more Israel builds settlements the better it is for reaching a negotiated agreement with the Palestinians. After all, stopping settlement construction would only push them away.

Meanwhile, former foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman came out with what is probably the most moderate and diplomatically pragmatic statement he has probably ever made, confirming that there has been a de facto building freeze in East Jerusalem since no new tenders are being put through the pipeline. He explained that this “temporary hiatus” is meant to give U.S. Secretary of State Kerry a chance to succeed in his peacemaking efforts.

As, Noam Sheizaf reported Monday, construction of new housing in the West Bank – as opposed to East Jerusalem –  is at a seven-year high.

On May 10th, Breaking the Silence –  an organization of veteran IDF soldiers who collect testimonies from soldiers about their past service in the occupied Palestinian territories – released a series of new video testimonies by former female soldiers who testify on camera to the harsh reality of the occupation they participated in and witnessed.

This campaign is of special significance to me because it gives voice to the women who comprise Israel’s army and its mechanism for continued occupation and oppression, happening within a society (local and global) in which, as women, they already exist in a gender power dynamic of systematic discrimination and violence.

They are the ones who can spend two years of their lives serving coffee in uniform, the ones subject almost exclusively to orders from male superiors – from the officers, to the generals, to the chief of staff and defense minister; the ones who are automatically considered less suitable to serve the country because they cannot serve in all the combat units; the ones who need to be much more creative and determined if they want to succeed in Israeli society without following its social norms.

Here is the BTS press release on the campaign, followed by several videos:

These testimonies seek to tell the Israeli public and international community what it means to be a woman serving in the territories. In order to prove oneself as a woman soldier, one needs to be ‘more manly than a man.’ Often, for female soldiers to become ‘one of the guys,’ it means that they must use violence and show force in their everyday tasks. The testimonies paint a difficult picture, whereby whoever isn’t willing to be violent and abusive finds herself socially ostracized. As female soldiers in the OPT, we also had to beat, detain, humiliate and intimidate Palestinians. We weren’t supposed to tell our families and friends what we did and what it means to serve in the territories.

Related:
Israeli occupation: You have to see it to believe it

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in front of an Israeli flag (Kobi Gideon/GPO)

Prime Minister Netanyahu said a few interesting (and politically genius) things at the weekly cabinet meeting Sunday. Various media outlets construed his statement in different ways, which was apparent in the different headlines with which they led.

Many English-language news sites chose some variation of the headline: “Israel won’t intervene in Syria unless fired upon.” The Times of Israel, however, led with, “Netanyahu alludes to military action at Syrian border,” which is almost the reverse meaning but remains logical nonetheless, since Netanyahu  was referring to the vaccum left by waning UN forces on the Golan.

Other local Jewish Israeli sites — in Hebrew and English — led with variations of: “Netanyahu says Israel can’t depend on international forces for its security” Haaretz added to its headline the clause: in any future peace agreement with the Palestinians.  Of course all these headlines are connected and related. Most important is the connection Netanyahu makes between the tensions on the Syrian border and a negotiated solution with the Palestinians.

Let’s look at what Netanyahu actually said. (from the PMO’s website):

Israel is not intervening in the Syrian civil war, as long as fire is not being directed at us. The crumbling of the UN force on the Golan Heights underscores the fact that Israel cannot depend on international forces for its security. They can be part of the arrangements. They cannot be the basic foundation of Israel’s security.

I will also discuss this with U.S. Secretary of State Kerry. I have spoken, and will speak, with him about this, and together we will try to advance a way to find an opening for negotiations with the Palestinians with the goal of reaching an agreement. This agreement will be based on a demilitarized Palestinian state that recognizes the Jewish state, and on solid security arrangements based on the IDF.

Netanyahu managed to transition smoothly from saying Israel will not intervene in Syria unless attacked, to stating (read: deducing) that any deal with the Palestinians must happen on Israel’s terms because the UN peacekeeping force is crumbling and unreliable.

That may certainly be the case, and no country can be expected to willfully turn its security over to a foreign entity. However, the direct correlation between the very real implications for Israel from the Syrian civil war and the fact that no agreement with the Palestinians can be based on international security forces, sounds awfully like a reference to Samantha Power’s statements from 2002, circulated last week following her nomination to be the next U.S. ambassador to the UN. In it, she discusses imposing a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through “external intervention” and backed by a “meaningful military presence,” which of course made a lot of noise in Republican and “pro-Israel” media circles.

She has since distanced herself from these statements (she has to if she wants to avoid the “pro-Israel’ onslaught) and was subsequently  endorsed by key pro-Israel figures like Alan Dershowitz.

Looking at Netanyahu’s words in the cabinet today, it seems he was directly addressing Kerry, via Obama and his Power appointment, drawing a comparison between the violence in Syria and its impact on Israel with his conditions for negotiations with the Palestinians. The two issues are entirely separate, of course. And therein lies his political savviness.

He used the chaos in Syria in order to reaffirm Israel’s preconditions and unilateral approach to negotiations with the Palestinians. In the process, by comparing the two, he sent a message that Israel cannot trust any Arab state or international entity. In other words, he reiterated that Israel will only trust itself when it comes to security.

While that may be true, and while no country can be expected to put all of its security in foreign hands, it does not justify establishing unilateral and unbalanced preconditions for an agreement with Palestinians (i.e. demilitarization). Especially when Israel is unwilling to make the most basic move: ceasing to build on territory designated for a viable Palestinian state.

A member of the Ghaith family stands among the rubble of his house after it was demolished by Israeli authorities in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of At Tur on April 29, 2013. (photo: Guest photographer Tali Mayer/Activestills.org)

One thing has become abundantly clear about Israeli policy when it comes to land: first it acts, only later giving its legal stamp of approval. This is essentially how the state was first established and built itself up, and is the story of how all settlements are born to this day in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

Make your presence known on a piece of land for long enough, get a trailer, set up a makeshift synagogue, wait until the state provides electricity and water and it is only a matter of time before it is recognized, de facto or officially. The chances that a court will order that an outpost-turned-settlement be removed are very slim (and even slimmer that the state will enforce such a legal decision), as is evident from the half-a-million settlers who live in the West Bank and East Jerusalem today, and the 100 or so outposts that are considered illegal even under Israeli law.

Does it really matter, therefore, what the courts, the attorney general or the High Court of Justice have to say about it, one way or another. For on the one hand, they are committed to the ethics of law, but on the other hand, are bodies that serve a state which prioritizes Jewish rights in every aspect of life.

Israel’s High Court recently asked Attorney General Yehuda Weinstein to explain his stance on the state’s confiscation of Palestinian land in East Jerusalem. His answer was that it is a-okay.  The 1950 Absentee Property Law was designed to give the state the legal tools to confiscate Palestinian refugees’ property. The refugees, from the 1948 war, were literally “absent” from their homes at the time – a very fitting criteria considering it was a time of war, during which people fled and were forced out.

The way Israel uses the law is kind of like stealing someone’s seat if they get up for a second to go to the bathroom. The state takes advantage of a vulnerable moment in time to claim something as their own – forever. It’s not that Israel has any more of a legal right to that seat, it just seized the opportunity and then decided to build a legal framework to justify it. Israel’s obvious political ambitions in East Jerusalem make the legal aspect of such confiscation totally arbitrary in nature. Does it matter whether or not it is deemed legal or not? The fact is Israel is taking over more and more Palestinian land, for use by Jews.

This is why two former attorneys general ruled that the law specifically cannot be applied in East Jerusalem. In the eastern half of the city, which was a contiguous part of the West Bank until 1967, the lines between modern day Greater Jerusalem and the West Bank are arbitrary.  Many Palestinians who were living in the West Bank and owned property in East Jerusalem could not be present to maintain their ownership. (For details on the history of this law and its application, read Ir Amim’s comprehensive report).

But despite these legal opinions, given in 1968 and in 2005, and the 1970 amendment to the law limiting its application in East Jerusalem, the legal confiscation goes on. A large portion of today’s Jewish settlement in Sheikh Jarrah, Silwan and the Muslim Quarter of the Old City was made possible over the last 30 years through the Absentee Property Law.

So, as far as I’m concerned, the attorney general’s kosher certification of the continued confiscation of Palestinian land in East Jerusalem is just a formality Israel needs in order to continue acting as it wishes. The policy is just as arbitrary as was Israel’s decision to annex 70 square kilometers of the West Bank into Jerusalem two weeks after the Six-Day War in 1967, a decision that no other state in the world recognizes as legal to this day.

Today, Palestinians mark the consequences of the Six-Day War, in which Israel occupied the West Bank and East Jerusalem. By erasing any trace of the pre-1967 borders through such legal theater surrounding the confiscation of Palestinian land, Israel’s government is pushing Palestinians to focus their national struggle on one year: 1948 — the Nakba. This focus has brought about a shift toward liberating all of mandatory Palestine, instead of only those territories occupied 46 years ago today.

Israeli children on a ride at ‘Superland’ (Photo: Superland website)

“Superland” – the Israeli amusement park exposed for segregating Arab and Jewish citizens this week – is the most fittingly tragic and ironic title for how I see the current Israeli zeitgeist. No screenwriter or playwright could have come up with a better concept for a tragic comedy about this place.

It captures the two most dominant concepts of politics and life here: that land is the most precious, contested and painful commodity around which the conflict revolves, and that there is nothing “amusing” about the situation we find ourselves in. It’s not all that “super,” despite the most earnest attempts to sell it as such by Israeli government and PR professionals.

While the Israeli government continues to try and “super-size” the land of Greater Israel beyond the pre-1967 borders, the story of segregation at Superland is a perfect indicator that no matter what your politics are, no matter your position on settlements, your notion of security, how you judge Palestinian resistance or any other issue, the political reality remains undeniably the same. Everyone living on this tiny piece of land — Arabs and Jews, Palestinians and Israelis — is in a perennial situation of state-sponsored division, segregation and separation that trickles down — not just in Hebron’s Shuhada Street, or in East Jerusalem, but everywhere.

After the Jaffa school teacher was unable to make a reservation for a class trip to Superland because they are Arab, management explained that many schools – both Arab and Jewish – request to visit the park on days when only other schools of the same ethnic group will be there. According to a statement by the park’s management, this makes sense for them considering they are interested in ensuring the safety of all visitors:

This is an amusement park and there is special importance to preserving order and preventing violent incidents in the park. As a result, Superland’s management took the requests it received into consideration, and during June 2013, set aside a few separate days for schools from different sectors.

This is the same argument that was made in pre-civil rights America about the utility of separating blacks and whites. It is the same argument that Ivy League university deans in the U.S. used to try and justify the quotas that up until the 1960s, limited the number of Jews accepted to a school; they explained that it is better for the Jews if there aren’t too many of them in any given department, since then they would surely experience greater incidents of anti-Semitism.

Instead of combatting anti-Semitism and racism at its core, this kind of backwards logic gives in to the unjust system, trying simply to manage a racist and discriminatory status quo. This is exactly the case of Superland.

It is a weird coincidence that on the same day this story broke, American author and BDS activist Alice Walker wrote an open letter to singer Alicia Keys, urging her to cancel her July concert in Israel because of the country’s segregation policies. In the letter, she specifically refers to the struggle she waged to bring an end to “apartheid America,” which she calls “less lethal than Israel’s against the Palestinian people.”

You can argue all you want that there are differences between America and Israel as far as racism goes, just as there are differences between Israel and South Africa when it comes to Apartheid. But the reality remains the same in all places: Palestinians living on the same land as Jewish Israelis are denied the dignity and equal rights they deserve because of the dominant ethnic group.

“Superland” perfectly expresses the “super segregation” we live in. Its policy isn’t a law that was handed down from above, or a specific manager who hates Arabs. It has simply become the norm.

Related:
Sailing on a wave of racism: A nautical tale
A year in review: Anti-African racism and asylum seekers in Israel 

Israeli police [illustrative photo] (Oren Ziv/Activestills.org)

But the Israel Police were well aware of her citizenship status when she went to alert them of her concerns for her daughters’ safety and begged them for help, just one day before the two girls were killed. As Dandis told the press, Israeli police ignored her repeated complaints in both the Arad and Ma’ale Adumim stations, because she is Palestinian. This is likely why they didn’t feel responsible for acting on her complaints, and instead referred her to the Palestinian Civil Affairs Coordination and Liaison Committee.

Dandis is from Al-Azaria, a town east of Jerusalem in Area B of the West Bank. Area B is under Palestinian civil authority and Israeli security authority, so the Israel Police are in fact responsible for acting there. Furthermore, the girls’ father, who is the prime suspect in their murder, is an Israeli citizen. On top of that, the crime itself took place inside Israel, so any way you look at it, the Israel Police appears to be responsible – and this is likely why the senior officers involved were almost immediately dismissed. Unfortunately, the fact that police are now assuming responsibility cannot bring the girls back.

This horrible murder is a prime example of how efforts to seek refuge from domestic violence can become entangled and entirely dependent on the fuzzy and Kafkaesque guidelines of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Under any reasonable norms, anyone living under Israeli rule should be able to seek protection from the police regardless of their citizenship or residency status. But as Amira Hass points out today in Haaretz, Dandis found herself in the “legal-bureaucratic maze created by the Oslo Accords.” It is a system in which Palestinian police are barred from taking action against Israeli civilians and Israeli police are less than eager to deal with internal Palestinian crime – even in areas under their direct jurisdiction.

Liberal Israelis often argue that Palestinian citizens of Israel – who are discriminated against in nearly all aspects of civilian life because they are not Jews – deserve to be treated equally because they hold citizenship. But is that really possible in a place where nearly all aspects of life are determined by the national security interests of Israeli Jews alone?

Examples of discrimination against non-Jews are abundant on both sides of the Green Line. In the West Bank, Israeli security forces regularly refuse and fail to protect Palestinians from settler violence. Inside Israel, the government is pushing forward plans to displace its own Bedouin citizens so that Jewish settlements can be erected on the remnants of their villages.

In that context of the reality of Israeli rule, the murder of Dandis’s daughters – and the Israeli police’s failure to stop it – highlights the way the Jewish state has succeeded in compartmentalizing control over West Bank Palestinians. Israel has taken all the power over land and resources but almost none of the responsibility for protecting the people there. This is essentially a de facto definition of Israeli occupation.

And after all, doesn’t Abir Dandis deserve to be treated with respect and dignity by Israeli authorities that have direct control over her life, even though she is not a citizen? This is why international law stipulates that the occupying force must protect the occupied population.

In its Basic Laws, Israel defines itself as a Jewish state. The current Knesset is even debating a new law that would prioritize Israel’s Jewish character over its democratic one. When the state actively defines itself as belonging to one people, and not all its citizens, it should come as no surprise that Israeli authorities do not feel responsible for protecting Palestinians, regardless of whether they are citizens.

Women of the Wall praying at Kotel May 10, 2013 (Activestills)

Protesters reportedly threw stones, water bottlers, garbage and whatever else they could in their direction, and a few were reportedly arrested. The police managed to enable a small group of 20-30 women to actually reach the women’s section at the Wall. According to Haaretz, the women planned to bring a Torah scroll, but decided not to at the last minute due to Naftali Bennett’s request. Haredi community leaders, including Shas spiritual leader Rabbi Ovadia Yosef urged young women to go out in mass to pray Friday to push Women of the Wall members aside.

According to the Haredi community, women are not allowed to wear prayer shawls or phylacteries, or read from the Torah at the site. However on April 25 the Jerusalem District Court ruled that a 2003 Supreme Court decision that such practices disturb the Orthodox character of the site did not warrant arrests by police. Attorney General Yehuda Weinstein decided not to appeal the decision, making Friday’s prayer service the first time in 24 years that Women of the Wall were offered legal protection and some form of official legitimacy.

According to a Women of the Wall representative, the group is greatly appreciative of the Israel Police’s protection, and calls on ultra-Orthodox leadership to denounce all forms of violence against women. Here is a video the group released:

For nearly 25 years, Women of the Wall members have gone every Rosh Hodesh (first of the Hebrew month) to pray on the women’s side of the barricade at the Kotel plaza– but are often harassed and prevented from doing so – and have on several occasions been arrested. The group’s mission is to achieve the social and legal recognition of the right of women to wear prayer shawls, pray, and read from the Torah collectively and out loud at the Western Wall.

Related:
MKs join hundreds of women praying at Western Wall, defying law

According to sources from Youth Against Settlements and B’Tselem with whom I spoke, the children were detained because settlers from the extremist Beit Hadassah settlement inside Hebron complained to the IDF that they had thrown stones. One of the children is only 10, the others 11 and 12 (the age of criminal responsibility is 12).

Issa Amro, a Palestinian activist with Youth Against Settlements who has been arrested countless times for organizing and engaging in peaceful protests in Hebron’s Tul Rumeida area where he lives, told me that the arrest of children by the IDF has become a regular “phenomenon” in Hebron. He says the IDF is “pro-settler,” often arresting Palestinian residents, whether children or adults, simply because settlers tell them to – regardless of whether there is any evidence against them. He also points out that settlers are almost never detained after they throw stones, even when the soldiers are standing right there. Issa added: “These arrests do not stop violence, on the contrary, they feed violence more and more in the long term.”

According to Ynet, the Swedish activist was arrested because he tried to steal a soldier’s weapon and resisted arrest – however the first video below makes both those accusations appear false, although he clearly made an effort to stop the soldiers from taking the children. (It is also well known that the IDF tries to deport foreign citizens living and documenting life in the West Bank). I contacted the IDF Spokesperson several times in recent days to hear its side of the story, but have yet to receive a response.

According to B’Tselem, the children were investigated at the Kiryat Arba police station with an adult present, and released 3-4 hours later. The Swedish activist is reportedly still in Israeli custody and trying to avoid deportation.

The first video below, published by Youth Against Settlement, shows one of the children and the Swede being arrested. Below that is a video filmed by an member of the Ecumenical Accompaniment Programme in Palestine and Israel (EAPPI) showing the arrest of one of the other children at the same time. Needless to say they are very disturbing, and no one in Israeli media is giving it any attention.

Related:
WATCH: Israeli soldiers stand by, escort settlers as they attack Palestinian villages