Human Rights: Critics see vendetta in al-Arian’s legal limbo Ali Gharib WASHINGTON (IPS) – Palestinian activist and former university professor… Read More »Human rights critics see vendetta in al arians legal limbo
Human rights groups say latest round of bulldozing of illegal homes will lead to forced removals of nomadic Arabs
(source: the guardian.uk)
The demolition of a Bedouin village in Israel’s Negev desert has led human rights groups to warn that a new wave of forced removals of nomadic Arabs could be under way.
Forty-five homes in the village of al-Araqib were bulldozed at dawn a week ago, after a court ruling that they were constructed illegally. Around 300 residents, all Israeli citizens and half of them children, were made homeless in temperatures of up to 40C.
Many more "unrecognised" Bedouin villages in the Negev could face demolition after the approval last month of a plan to transfer large numbers of Bedouin Arabs to government-designated townships in the north of the area.
The planning committee of Beersheba, the largest city in the area, allocated Bedouin villages to three categories: no recognition and full population transfer (12 villages); partial recognition and partial or full transfer (17 villages); and full recognition (13 villages).
Families in the first two categories would be forcibly moved to seven special Bedouin-only townships created by the government. About half the Bedouin population of southern Israel already lives in the townships, which have basic services such as water, electricity and sewage. But the remainder want to remain in their villages, where they can continue with small-scale agriculture and grazing their herds.
"This could well be the opening to more demolitions of Bedouin villages," said Nili Baruch of Bimkom, an Israeli planning rights group. "There is a clear plan and a clear goal."
Read More »Israel criticised over demolition of unrecognised bedouin villages
(source: www.plfpakistan.com)
Khaled Mishaal, head of Hamas’s political bureau, met on Friday with Kgalema Motlanthe, South Africa’s deputy president, in the Syrian capital Damascus and discussed the main files of the Palestinian issue topped by Palestinian national reconciliation and the peace process.
After the meeting Mishaal and Motlanthe held a joint press conference and talked about what they had tackled during their meeting.
Mishaal said that Hamas briefed the visiting delegation on Hamas’s position on the various aspects of the Palestinian issue and on the National aspirations on which Palestinians in Palestine and in exile agree on, namely: the right to self determination, ending the occupation, restoring the land, Jerusalem and rights, the return of refugees to their homes from which they were expelled, achieving national reconciliation and uniting the Palestinian leadership through a reformed PLO.
“Our brothers from South Africa have promised to stand by the Palestinian people [in their struggle] to realise their rights and [achieve their] aspirations. As the people of South Africa achieved their aspirations and national project, God will help us realise our aspirations with their help and the help of our friends worldwide,” Mishaal said.
Asked on the new Israeli “loyalty law” which was passed recently Motlanthe said that Israeli laws are not international laws and that he was sure that Palestinians will resist this law, adding that Palestinians have the full right to self determination.
Read More »Mishaal meets south Africas deputy president in damascus
By John V. Walsh
(source: AntiWar.com)
Eclipsed by the36in Egypt, news from its little neighbor has not gleaned much notice save for media angst that Egyptian democracy might not be as genial as was the Mubarak dictatorship to the relentless, long-term ethnic cleansing of an indigenous people, the Palestinians. But news there was as Israeli “human riSendghts” lawyers went public with a libel suit against Jimmy Carter for his precise little book, Palestine, Peace Not Apartheid. The stunner to the Israelis lies in a single word in Carter’s title, “apartheid.”
Names, names, names. What constitutes an accurate description of Israel? There are many appellations, none of them appealing. The partisans of Israel like to call it “the Jewish state.” But that name carries a disconcerting note. We do not like “Islamic states,” and “Christian state” calls forth40of fascism, bigotry, and Crusades. Does “Jewish state” sound any more tolerant?
Then there is the very old-fashioned label, “a people without a land and a land without a people.” Not even the European colonialists of the Americas had the chutzpah to deny the very existence of the indigenous peoples as they were exterminated or put into reservations, the Gazas of the New World. Though that racist little phrase continued up to Golda Meir, who denied the very existence of the Palestinians, at least by the time of the terrorist Yitzhak Shamir the Palestinians had transmogrified into “insects” or “cockroaches.” At least Shamir allowed for their pesky, subhuman existence.
Then there is “colonial, settler state,” an accurate name well understood by the developing world as it continues its struggle to throw off the hidden shackles of European domination – but not well understood as yet in the more or less post-colonial West. Of course there is the “Zionist entity,” again well understood by the oppressed of the Middle East, but a mystery to many in the West who have been trained to perceive it as anti-Semitic.