A new bill allowing discrimination against Israelis who don’t serve in the army contradicts some of Israel’s Basic Laws, Attorney General Yehuda Weinstein wrote in an opinion published Sunday evening. The bill, he added, will hurt population groups which are already discriminated against.

According to the draft legislation, favoring people who served in the IDF will not be considered discrimination nor will it be challengeable in court. Since Palestinian citizens of Israel are not required to serve in the military and most ultra-Orthodox are exempted from doing so, the new bill will give employers and real-estate owners a legal way to reject Palestinian applicants. Palestinians are already under-represented in the public sector and in access to national resources.

Yesterday (Sunday) The Knesset’s Ministerial Committee for Legislation decided to support the bill. Justice Minister Tzipi Livni has already announced that  she would appeal the decision, meaning that the Knesset votes on the bill will be postponed.

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Israeli government to back law allowing discrimination against Palestinians, ultra-Orthodox

The Israeli government’s Ministerial Committee for Legislation decided today (Sunday) to back a bill by MK Yariv Levin (Likud) which will allow discrimination against Arabs and ultra-Orthodox in employment and real-estate rights.

According for the suggested legislation, favoring people who served in the IDF will not be considered discrimination nor will it be challengeable in court. Since Palestinian citizens of Israel are not required to serve in the military and most ultra-Orthodox are exempted from doing so, the new bill will give employers and real-estate owners a legal way to reject Palestinian applicants.

Palestinians are underrepresented in almost all areas of public life in Israel. While they constitute 20 percent of the population, only 8 percent of the public sector’s workers are Palestinian. Unemployment is higher among Palestinians, and two-thirds of Palestinian citizen’s children grow up beneath the poverty line.

“On the one hand, the government claims that participation of Palestinians and ultra-Orthodox in the workforce should increase, while at the same time, it initiate laws which are meant to leave them out of it,” Meretz leader Zehava Gal-On told Ynet News.

Last week I wrote about the outdated feeling the debate over the occupation renders. One commenter wondered why both Larry Derfner (who also commented on the article) and I are “disappointed” with Knesset members from Yair Lapid’s Yesh Atid party, even though they say the very same thing we write about on this site.

I didn’t vote for Lapid, but his pact with the extreme right is enough of a reason to dismiss any hope that he will contribute to the end of the occupation in the foreseeable future. However, the issue here is not the existence of one, or two, or 40 Israeli MKs who are ready to speak about the need to end the occupation, but rather the entire logic of the debate.

In Israeli eyes, the urgency of changing the status quo, or even the whole notion of ending the occupation, is something for Israelis to discuss “democratically.” As long as there are two opposing camps – “pro peace” and “pro settlements”, or any other name one might chose – things are just fine. Those wishing to end the occupation can try to help the “pro peace” camp win, just as president Obama did in his Jerusalem speech.

It is a very twisted view. There is nothing “democratic” about debating – for almost half a century – the right of millions to basic human and civil rights. And what if Israelis decide, and one might say they already have, not to end the occupation? What if they choose to leave the Palestinians under military law for good? Is that an option we should accept, because it was reached in “a democratic way?”

Israeli democracy is meaningless when it comes to the Palestinian issue, since most of the Palestinians are not allowed to take part in this debate, let alone vote. Israelis can debate how they end the occupation, but not whether they do it at all. This is why I feel very comfortable with supporting outside pressure that would force Israelis to change their mind.

Thus, we shouldn’t be impressed with some Knesset members who speak out against the occupation, but rather ask ourselves what steps they are taking to end it. In the case of MKs from Lapid’s party, who respect their alliance with the settlers and help maintain a right-wing, pro-occupation coalition, the answer is pretty clear.

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In Israel, a...

While a third of the Knesset joins the pro-settlement caucus, one member of the coalition warns of a ‘South African’ future.

The Israeli political conversation has a strange sense of déjà vu these days: on Wednesday, during a panel organized by the think-tank Molad, Knesset Member Ofer Shelah of Yesh Atid warned that if Israel fails to disengage from the West Bank, it will face a similar fate to that of Apartheid South Africa. “The occupation,” said Shelah, “corrupts Israeli society. It corrupts the army, corrupts Israeli justice, Israeli media, Israeli psyche and Israeli language.”

Facing Shelah at the panel were MK Yoni Chetboun from the settlers’ Jewish Home party, and MK Tzipi Hotovely (Likud) who called for leaving the idea of the two-state solution in the past. If changing the status quo becomes inevitable, Chetboun and Hotolevy support annexing the West Bank and gradually offering Israeli citizenship to the Palestinians over the next decade.

These sound like statements I heard growing up in Israel in the 1980s. Back then, the two sides were talking about keeping “the whole land of Israel” (“Eretz Yisrael Hashlema”) vs. those favoring “the Jordanian option” – handing the West Bank back to King Hussein – an idea which was torpedoed by Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir just before the First Intifada.

This was an old debate even back then. In fact, this debate began in the days following the Six-Day War. By now, almost half a century later, it’s obvious that a argument over the future of “the territories” has itself become an inherent part of the occupation. The conversation satisfies foreign observes (“the Israeli peace camp is back!”), while granting the status quo of ethnic control a feeling of a temporariness - that it will be resolved any day now.

It should therefore be remembered that Shelah, Hotovely and Chetboun are political allies within the same coalition. In fact, Shelah and Chetboun are part of the Yesh Atid-Jewish Home alliance, which is the dominant force in this government. Shelah is even his party’s Knesset chairman, meaning that his duty is to guarantee that Knesset members from Yesh Atid vote with the coalition. When he is not speaking on panels, he makes sure that the new budget – which is overwhelmingly pro-settlement – passes. In short, there is a major disconnect between the realm of talk and that of political action.

On the same day of the...

Despite the 2011 tent protests, housing construction has actually decreased over the last year in Israel. At the same time, the West Bank registered a national high in new construction projects for Jewish settlers.

Israeli bulldozers seen in the settlement of Halamish near the West Bank village of Nabi Saleh, April 19, 2013. (Photo by: Ahmad Al-Bazz/Activestills.org)

According to the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics, new construction projects in West Bank settlements have grown by 176 percent (!) compared to the same period last year (January-March 2012). This is a 355 percent increase, when compared to the final quarter of 2012 (October-December).

Currently, construction projects for Jews in the West Bank make up eight percent of all construction projects in Israel (not including those run by the Palestinian Authority).

The numbers refer only to legal projects and not to unregulated projects in the so-called “outposts.” Furthermore, construction projects in annexed East Jerusalem are left out are are counted separately. Construction projects in Jerusalem as a whole make up 13 percent of the national figure, and since the city cannot be developed to the west, at least some of the new projects are done beyond the Green Line.

Despite the real estate crisis and the public protest, new construction projects in Israel actually decreased by 8.9 percent during the same period. These figures can help explain the attractiveness of settling in the occupied territories for many Jews.

Peace Now, which does the most extensive work on monitoring settlement growth, issued the following response:

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EU diplomats recommend sanctions against Israeli settlements

Palestinian workers queue at a checkpoint to enter Israel. (photo: Anne Paq, Activestills)

A senior employee at right-wing organization NGO Monitor penned an interesting op-ed in Israeli daily Yisrael Hayom this morning (Sunday).

NGO Monitor, which targets organizations and people who actively oppose the occupation, is obsessed with use of the term Apartheid. The piece by NGO Monitor’s deputy director of communications, Lena Abayev, is a longwinded attack on those who compare the situation in the West Bank to that of Apartheid South Africa.

Interestingly enough, there are only two sentences in which the author actually addresses reality on the ground in the West Bank. Sadly, they work against her argument:

Those mildly familiar with South African history know that the permit regime (aka Pass Laws) for blacks in South Africa was one of the most notorious aspects of Apartheid. Similar (but by no means identical) procedures are an inherent part of the regime to which millions of Palestinian non-citizens are subjected.

Israel controls all population registration in the Occupied Territories. All Palestinians must carry Israeli-issued ID cards and their identity is subject to verification by the Israeli army at all times. A complicated system of permits and regulation of movement exists both within the West Bank and travelling in and out of it. A Palestinian’s degree of cooperation with the army is directly correlated to his or her ability to travel freely, and only a tiny portion of the population – tens of thousands out of over two million – have permits to work west of the Green Line. (Contrary to what Abayev says, even those workers are not permitted to travel freely within Israel. But getting facts straight was never a big priority for NGO Monitor).

Personally, I don’t care much for the Apartheid analogy because it misses some of the unique characteristics of Israel’s military regime in the Occupied Territories (and for several other reasons). It could, however, be useful in illustrating certain aspects of the occupation, particularly the separate legal systems for Israelis and Palestinians; I have previously used the term in this context. It is therefore interesting to note that NGO Monitor actually finds the Israeli permit system to be proof that Apartheid doesn’t exist in...

Did Haggai Matar lose his job at ‘Maariv’ because of his political views, or was it his involvement in the paper’s union that led management to order his dismissal?

Haggai Matar (holding a megaphone) leading employees of Israeli newspaper Maariv in a protest against their dismissal inside Azrieli Commercial Center in September 2012. (photo: Oren Ziv/Activestills.org)

Israeli daily Maariv filed a statement to the Tel Aviv District Labor Court claiming that the paper chose not to rehire Tel Aviv municipal reporter Haggai Matar because his opinions are “different from the editorial line that a Zionist newspaper like Maariv wishes to present.”

Haggai Matar (who is also a contributor at +972), was the head of the Maariv journalist union’s worker’s committee when the paper was under threat of shutting down last summer. Maariv was eventually bought by right-wing businessman Shlomo Ben-Zvi in a court-led process that saw all of the paper’s employees fired and then most of them rehired by the new owner.

Matar, who negotiated with management on behalf of the editorial staff, wasn’t among those rehired. Israeli labor law allows for the firing of union leaders only in extreme circumstances.In response, the journalists’ union filed a petition on behalf of Matar to the Tel Aviv Labor Court.

A couple of weeks ago, Matar’s direct boss, Yuval Haiman, testified to the court that he had pretended it was his own initiative not to rehire Matar, whereas management had instructed him not to rehire Matar all along. Haiman speculated that the reason was Matar’s unique role in the union.

Following this development, Maariv Deputy CEO Udi Ragunis filed a statement to the court in which he claimed that political reasons, not labor issues, led to management’s order not to rehire Matar, media site The 7th Eye reported:

In the months since Matar was fired, Maariv claimed that manpower issues in its local Tel Aviv edition and changes in the paper under new management led to the decision to cut Matar’s position. The political motive was only raised following the testimony of Matar’s boss, Yuval Haiman, who revealed the order he was given not to rehire Matar.

Disclaimer: I contribute a weekly op-ed to Maariv, but I have not been employed by the...

The paper’s correspondent in Berlin, known for his ties with radical right-wing groups, has done it again.

In a couple of articles published last month, the widely-read Jerusalem Post compared the European Union’s decision to label Israeli settlement products to nothing less than Nazism.

A year ago, the European Union passed a decision to label Israeli goods produced in the occupied territories, differentiating them from products of Israel proper. The Union is objecting to Israel’s settlement policy, but nevertheless has many trade agreements and joint projects with Israel. (The EU is Israel’s largest trade partner.) The decision to label products from the occupied territories was seen as a political compromise, allowing consumers to decide whether they want to purchase them or not, but remaining very far from a total ban of those products, let alone a boycott of Israeli goods.

Recently, 13 European Counties wrote EU Foreign Affairs chief Catharine Ashton, requesting that she forumlate guidelines for product labeling. Some EU countries have already taken some independent steps in this direction.

In Germany, the Green Party sent a questionnaire to the government asking what steps it plans to take on the issue of settlement labeling. The government has confirmed that it doesn’t view the settlements as part of the European-Israeli trade agreement.

In response, The Jerusalem Post published a piece in which the paper (citing various “public figures,” all expressing the same opinion) accuses the Green Party of no less than Nazi policy – naturally, the most serious accusation one could make in Europe, and most of all in Germany.

Another item in the Post targeted Bundestag deputy Kerstin Müller, who is set to be the new head of the Tel Aviv office of the Heinrich Böll Foundation, which is affiliated with the Green Party (disclaimer: +972 Magazine has received support from the Heinrich Böll Foundation). The piece cites a rabbi from the Wiesenthal Center who says that “Ms. Müller should relocate to Riyadh, not Tel Aviv.”

There is a back story here: the reporter behind both stories – the one who called politicians and Jewish community leaders asking for their comments on the Green Party questionnaire – is Benjamin Weinthal, who is credited as the Post’s correspondent in Berlin. Weinthal, however, is a paid fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a U.S.-based neo-conservative think tank dedicated to fighting “militant Islamism” through “strategic communication”...

Image from video taken during the arrest of Abed Al-Rahem Awad in Budrus, May 2013 (video: IDF Spokesperson)

Earlier this week I reported here on the violent arrest of 19-year-old of Abed al-Rahem Awad from the Palestinian village of Budrus. Soldiers broke open the Awad family’s house doors before dawn on Sunday and dragged Abed al-Rahem down the stairs as his family members tried to release him from their hands. Several family members were beaten, including two females who ended up hospitalized; grenades were thrown into the house and considerable damage was done to their property. Several months ago, soldiers shot to death at close range Abed’s younger brother, Samir, as he was trying to cross the separation barrier near his village – an incident which is formally still under the investigation by the army.

A friend of the Awad family told me on Tuesday that “the entire family is in a state of shock, I haven’t seen them like this, even after the killing of Samir.”

This morning, I received the IDF’s response, along with a short clip from the arrest:

Here is the clip the army released. It was shot through the helmet camera of one or two soldiers:

Like all IDF clips in recent years, the full video was never released and all we see are three segments, several seconds each, in slow motion. The clip backs the version reported by the Palestinians, according to which the boy’s sisters were trying to prevent the soldiers from taking him. At least two of the girls are indeed seen waving knifes in front of the soldiers. According to testimony given to B’Tselem before the IDF clip was released, one sister threatened to cut herself if her brother is taken, but there is no way of confirming this.

* * *

I would like to add a few personal observations here. The reason the IDF sent me this partial video is because in the eyes of its very efficient Spokesperson’s Unit, the video includes damning evidence – the family is clearly resisting arrest and there are indeed knifes in the scene. We don’t know what happened before and after those shots, and also not...

Israeli soldiers beat and dragged Abed Al-Rahem Awad down the stairs of his home,  pepper sprayed his sisters and threw several stun grenades through the family’s windows. Earlier this year, the family lost Abed al-Rahem’s younger brother, who was shot in the back at close range after trying to cross the separation barrier near his home.

IDF stun grenades that were thrown into the Awad family’s home in Budrus.

Israeli soldiers violently arrested 19-year-old Abed al-Rahem Awad yesterday (Monday) morning, Palestinians from the village of Budrus reported. According to the reports, several soldiers entered the family home in the early morning, breaking through the doors with a compressed air device. Family members said they were awakened by Abed al-Rahem’s cries as soldiers were dragging him down the stairs. His sisters tried to prevent the arrest and soldiers beat and pepper sprayed them. The two sisters were taken to a hospital, one with a broken arm.

The soldiers also broke two of the house’s windows in order to throw several stun grenades (sound bombs) inside. Photos of where they exploded inside the home can be seen above. Soldiers did not give the family a reason for the arrest during the raid or in the day after.

In January, Israeli soldiers shot to death Abed al-Rahem’s 16-year-old brother, Samir Awad, near the village. Samir was hit once as he was trying to cross the separation fence some 200 meters from Budrus, and a couple more times from close range – one shot to in the back of his head and one in his back – after he tried to escape from the soldiers by running back toward the village.

Israeli authorities brought Abed al-Rahem to the hospital yesterday with both his legs and his arms shackled (see below). He was later taken back to jail. This morning (Tuesday) the Shin Bet (Israel Security Service) requested that an IDF military court extend his remand by 14 days. No charges were filed against him and so far the allegations against him are very minor – throwing stones at soldiers and participating in protests. His interrogation is being conducted by the Shin Bet.

A judge at the Ofer military court extended Abed al-Rahem’s arrest by eight...

This is one of the best images the Israeli social protest has produced: the Governor of the Bank of Israel and former chief economist at the World Bank Stanley Fischer walking out of a cultural event in central Tel Aviv, surrounded by protesters who happened to be gathering at a nearby square when they spotted him. The protesters shouted, “government and capital equal organized crime,” at Fischer and his wife (video here).

While government officials praise Fisher for his term at the Bank of Israel, many protesters blame him for pursuing a monetary policy that supports big business instad of the middle class, and for letting Israel’s real estate prices skyrocket. Fischer will complete his term at the Bank of Israel in a few weeks.

(Photo by Ilai Ben Amar; click for full size)

The Governor of the Bank of Israel and former World Bank chief economist Stanley Fischer surrounded by protesters as he and his wife walk out of a cultural event in Tel Aviv, May 25, 2013 (photo: Ilai Ben Amar)

Two notes on the Secretary of State’s mission to Israel/Palestine.

Prime Minister Netanyahu and U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry at their Meeting in Jerusalem (photo: Kobi Gideon/GPO)

1. Some time during the month of June, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry is expected to announce whether he will be able to reach a breakthrough in the Israeli-Palestinian diplomatic process. Two (out of three) months have passed since President’s Obama trip to Israel and Ramallah, and Kerry’s mission seems to have met a brick wall. Meaningful negotiations are nowhere nearer than they were last year or the year before. In fact, if there is one thing both Israelis and Palestinians agree about, it is the unlikelihood of a breakthrough.

Kerry just concluded another trip to the region, and due to the lack of progress he won’t be coming back in the next couple of weeks. His current visit was conducted under the shadow of the Israeli decision to recognize four new Jewish outposts in the occupied territories – a decision that strayed farther than any previous government from Israel’s commitment to the Bush administration to remove all new outposts and refrain from recognizing new settlements.

On Friday, Kerry held a press conference at Ben Gurion International Airport, in which he refused to provide a deadline for his efforts or go into any specifics vis-a-vis the positions of both parties (the full transcription of the press conference can be found here). Kerry also praised both parties for their desire for peace and warned against giving in to cynicism. He promised to continue his efforts, no matter what hurdles he will encounter.

Many people believe that there is a need to project such “optimism,” and nobody likes to be the bearer of bad news. However, what this moment calls for, more than anything else, is some honesty. Kerry would have done his own cause justice if he simply stated that there is no peace process, nor has there been one in recent times, and that the current trends on the ground are likely to continue in the foreseeable future.

Such statement would have forced the Israeli public – or at least parts of it – to seriously asses the long-term implications of its government’s policies. Furthermore, it would have saved...

Fishermen sell their daily catch near the Gaza City Harbor, January 2013 (photo: Anne Paq/Activestills.org)

The IDF will allow Gaza fishermen to go beyond three-mile zone previously imposed on them and up to six miles into the Mediterranean Sea, it announced on Tuesday. Under the Oslo Accords, Gaza’s maritime boundaries stretch 20 nautical miles from shore. However, as a part of its blockade policy, Israel does not allow fishermen to travel beyond a narrow strip of three to six miles – an area which changes at the discretion of the government and defense minister.

The Gaza strip is one of the most densely populated areas in the world (see map below) and fishing constitutes an important source of food and employment for many.

The IDF Spokesperson’s announcement on Tuesday basically confirmed that the army collectively punishes Gazan fishermen for rockets launched from the Strip.

Recent attempts to launch rockets from the Strip have been carried out by tiny radical organizations that even Hamas has trouble to controlling. So why are Gaza’s fishermen being punished for it?

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Gaza map and IDF imposed “forbidden zones” (by Gisha)