This week: May Day marches from Tel Aviv to Boston, reprisals for the stabbing death of a settler by a Palestinian, protests against domestic violence, demonstrations against settlement expansion, celebrations for hunger striker Samer Issawi, and demolitions of Palestinian properties continue.                            

Many Palestinians have despaired of complaining about violations against them. Yesh Din's new report, "The Road to Dispossession," shows why. By Yesh Din, written by Yossi Gurvitz April 14, 2011 was a special morning for the Hizme family from the village of Turmusaya: it was one of the few days they were allowed to work their land, which unfortunately for them is close to the illegal outpost Adei Ad. They received the necessary permits from the army. Even so, some 90 minutes after they started working, IDF personnel showed up and asked them to leave, so as not to "cause problems…

A quiet phenomenon has been taking place over the last decade: the quiet dispossession of the Palestinians from their lands, which in turn increases their despair and leads them to abandon their villages. All this is done in our name and with our funds, but the government makes certain Israelis remain ignorant of the facts. By Yesh Din, written by Yossi Gurvitz Yesh Din published one of most comprehensive reports, The Road to Dispossession (which has its own mini-site), dealing with the illegal outpost Adei Ad. The outpost sits between four Palestinian villages and robs them of their lands. The information we gathered…

Police make rare arrests in connection to settler violence against Palestinians. But the circumstances surrounding the shooting were unique, and likely played no small role in pushing police to investigate seriously. Update (April 3): Police released all of the suspects and cleared them of wrongdoing, according to The Jerusalem Post.  In a rare display of law enforcement against violent Jewish settlers, Israeli police raided the notorious illegal outpost of Esh Kodesh early Tuesday morning. Police arrested five settlers, including an active duty soldier, in connection with the near-fatal shooting of a young Palestinian man from the nearby village of Qusra…

Much of the Israeli public believes Palestinians lie constantly. This time, Yossi Gurvitz witnesses and documents evidence in real time. By Yesh Din, written by Yossi Gurvitz One of the problems with reporting what happens in the West Bank to the Israeli public is that it has grown accustomed to thinking that Palestinians lie. All of them. All the time. Without taking a break. This isn’t the place to examine this social construct – one suspects it exists because it is so convenient. Because it makes it easy to ignore every complaint with a shrug – and certainly Palestinians have been…

Israeli soldiers are the ones who make the prolonged dispossession of the Palestinians possible. If the army wasn’t there, violent settler attacks could not take place. By Yesh Din, written by Yossi Gurvitz One morning in late February of this year, J., a resident of a village in the Nablus district, went to work in his field along with his two cousins, M. and A. (We are not using the complainants's full names for the same reason members of the Shin Bet are only known by a single name: the fear, perfectly justified in this case, that by exposing complainants’…

Violence against Palestinians is no longer reserved for Israeli soldiers or settlers, who still justify their actions with “security.” The young Israelis who have been attacking Palestinians, unprovoked, on the streets of Western, educated, democratic Israel, have no such excuse. In the last week or so, the number of images of Palestinians laying in hospital beds or being carried away in coffins that has appeared in my news cycle is astonishing. It is not necessarily that there are more incidents of violence (it's certainly plausible though I have not seen any statistical reports yet), but the media is certainly giving…

The photo below was taken by an Israeli Ta'ayush activist on Saturday March 2 at 10:30a.m, in Umm al Amad, a Palestinian village in the South Hebron Hills close to the Otniel settlement. Shepherds from the village were trying to graze their sheep when according to the activist, Border Police officers showed up and simply expelled them. Masked settlers then came around to join in the intimidation and harassment. They were not questioned by the security forces or asked to identify themselves, but rather made nice. Although the settlers did not attack anyone in this incident, just a week and…

In third such project in as many weeks, hundreds of Palestinians erect new neighborhood of Burin, calling it Manatir. The activists and village residents were quickly attacked by IDF soldiers and local settlers. Update: After hours of clashes where IDF troops reportedly shot live bullets, tear gas and rubber-coated bullets inside the village of Burin, the army completely cleared the new neighborhood of Al Manitar. At least five Palestinians were arrested throughout the day and an unknown number were injured. See pictures of Border Police dispersing activists here. Some 300 Palestinians from the village of Burin and the popular committees against…

The Israeli army arrested 10 Palestinians and five Israelis in the South Hebron Hills today (Saturday) while they were trying to reach Palestinian-owned land next to the illegal outpost called Mitzpeh Yair, in the southern West Bank. According to Guy, an Israeli Ta'ayush activist who filmed the video below, the Awwad family from Umm al Ara'is was accompanied by Palestinians from Susya and Israeli activists to try and reach their land, since in recent months the army has been increasingly preventing them from doing so. As soon as they got there, the IDF soldiers declared it a "closed military zone" for reasons…

While Israelis are breathing a sigh of relief that quiet has mostly been restored (for the time being), and life can supposedly just go back to normal, with Gaza out of sight and out of mind, the other elephant in the room - the West Bank and East Jerusalem - is all but quiet. This morning (Sunday) a "price tag" attack was identified on a car in Shuafat, a Palestinian refugee camp in East Jerusalem, which is located inside the city's municipal borders (and thus under total Israeli jurisdiction). The car has the word "Gaza" graffitied on it, as pictured here in…

It was the first time Hashem Al Azzeh could harvest his olives in five years. Living directly next door to the Tel Rumeida settlement, which like all West Bank settlements is illegal under international law, he has faced years of harassment and violence from some of Israel's most ideological settlers. But this year, having coordinated with the proper authorities, he planned to quickly and quietly harvest the few trees standing between his house and the caravans stacked on top of each other to form the Jewish enclave just up the hill. Accompanied by a handful of International Solidarity Movement (ISM) volunteers,…

On Tuesday, a group of Palestinians and internationals managed to block Route 443, which connects Jerusalem to Tel Aviv through the West bank, with only extremely limited access for Palestinians on whose land it is built. The demonstration took the IDF by surprise, and blocked traffic for approximately 30 minutes. According to Ma'an News: Since 2002, Israel's military has prohibited Palestinians from using the highway, which Israel expanded on privately-owned Palestinian land. The ban disconnects seven villages from each other and from Ramallah. The Israeli high court ruled in Dec. 2009 that the ban on Palestinians using Route 443 in the…