ISRAELI SETTLER JEWS GET GO AHEAD TO BREAK THE LAW

Jerusalem’s mayor threatened last week to demolish 200 homes in Palestinian neighbourhoods of the city in an act even he conceded would probably bring long-simmering tensions over housing in East Jerusalem to a boil.His uncompromising stance is the latest stage in a protracted legal battle over a single building towering above the jumble of modest homes of Silwan, a deprived and overcrowded Palestinian community lying just outside the Old City walls, in the shadow of the silver-topped al Aqsa mosque.


Beit Yehonatan, or Jonathan’s House, is distinctive not only for its height – at seven storeys, it is at least three floors taller than its neighbours – but also for the Israeli flag draped from the roof to the fourth floor.The settlement outpost has been home to eight Jewish families since 2004, when it was built without a licence by an extremist settler organisation known as Ateret Cohanim.

Beit Yehonatan is one of dozens of settler-occupied homes springing up in Palestinian areas of East Jerusalem, most of them takeovers of Palestinian homes.

Critics say the intent of these “outposts”, together with the large settlements of East Jerusalem built by the state and home to nearly 200,000 Jews, is to foil any peace agreement that might one day offer the Palestinians a meaningful state with Jerusalem as its capital.


But exceptionally for the settlers, who are used to a mix of overt and covert assistance from officials, the inhabitants of Beit Yehonatan are at risk of being evicted from their home, two years after an “urgent” enforcement order was issued by the Israeli Supreme Court.


Last week Nir Barkat, Jerusalem’s mayor, finally agreed “under protest” to seal Beit Yehonatan amid mounting pressure from an array of legal officials. Mr Barkat had been fighting strenuously against implementing the court order, aided by senior members of the parliament, the police, and even Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, who opposed his own attorney general’s advice by declaring Beit Yehonatan’s future “a purely municipal matter”.


But the mayor has not simply capitulated. He warned that Beit Yehonatan would be evacuated only on condition that more than 200 demolition orders on Palestinian homes, most of them in Silwan, were carried out at the same time. He argued that he must avoid any impression that the law was being enforced in a “discriminatory” manner against Jews.

Jeff Halper, head of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, said Mr Barkat’s idea of fairness was “ridiculous”.


“In the past 15 years there have been more than a thousand Palestinian homes demolished in East Jerusalem versus absolutely no settler homes,” he said. “In fact, no settlers have ever lost their home in East Jerusalem.”

In making his announcement, Mr Barkat admitted that the 200 demolitions would trigger “a strong possibility for conflict”. Palestinians in East Jerusalem are already seething over decades of planning restrictions that have forced many of them to build or extend homes illegally because it is all but impossible to get permits from the Israeli authorities.


Mr Halper said the municipality had classified 22,000 Palestinian homes in East Jerusalem as illegal, even as it also assessed a shortage of 25,000 homes for the city’s 250,000-strong Palestinian population.

The homes targeted for demolition include Palestinian houses around Beit Yehonatan that violate planning restrictions that allow families to build only two floors; despite the restriction, many houses have four storeys and owners pay fines.
In addition, the city council wants to demolish 88 homes in a small area called Bustan that the municipality claims is in danger of flooding.

Zeinab Jaber lives next to Beit Yehonatan in the home she was born in 61 years ago. The building was declared illegal 20 years ago, after it was extended to four storeys to accommodate her growing family. Today she and her six grown-up sons pay monthly fines of more than $1,000 (Dh 3,672) in the hope of warding off destruction.
Her son Amjad, 32, married with two young sons, said he did not dare miss a payment. “It’s simple: if you don’t pay, you’ll end up in prison.”

“What is there for the settlers here?” Mrs Jaber asked. “They are only here because they want to take this place from us. They won’t be happy till we leave.”

On the opposite slope across the valley from Beit Yehonatan, Mohammed Jalajil, 48, said he did not doubt that the municipality would demolish the 200 homes. He, his wife and five children have been crammed into a room in a relative’s apartment since their own house was demolished seven years ago.
Mr Jalajil, 48, said: “It was only months after they took our house from us that I saw the settlers building theirs nearby. My lawyer tells me that, even though my house is gone, I won’t have paid off my fines for another 10 years.”

If Mr Barkat follows through with his threat, the demolitions will prompt a rebuke from the international community. Last month, France and the United States joined the UN in denouncing more than 100 demolitions in East Jerusalem over the past three months.
The mayor’s decision, warned Meir Margalit, a Jerusalem city councillor, was comparable to the “price tag” policy of the settlers in the West Bank, who have attacked Palestinian villages in retaliation against official attempts to dismantle a few of the settlement outposts dotting Palestinian territory.

Yesterday the municipality was due to issue seven-day evacuation notices to the inhabitants of Beit Yehonatan, but the operation was cancelled at the last minute when police refused to co-operate.
“But the difference here is that the price tag is being levied not by the settlers themselves but by the municipality and the government on their behalf,” he said.

Frictions have been growing in Silwan for several years over the activities of another settler organisation, Elad, which, with official backing, has been building an archaeological park known as the City of David in the midst of the Palestinian neighbourhood. As Palestinians have been pushed out, at least 80 Jewish families have moved into homes nearby.
As Elad entrenches itself in Silwan, Beit Yehonatan has proved more difficult to secure. “Usually the settlers present a façade of legality to what they do,” Mr Halper said. “The problem here is that they built in an overtly illegal manner, without a permit and way over the building height restrictions.”

Mr Barkat’s resistance to evicting Beit Yehonatan’s inhabitants was highlighted last month when he tried to stave off legal pressure by proposing a new planning policy to legalise unlicensed buildings in Silwan. The mayor proposed that the rules limiting homes to two storeys would be revised to four.
The reform would have applied to Beit Yehonatan first, sealing its top three storeys but allowing the Jewish families to inhabit the rest of the building.

Although Mr Barkat promised that illegal Palestinian buildings would also be saved, Ir Amim, an Israeli human rights groups, dismissed the mayor’s claim.

The overwhelming majority of Palestinian homes would fail to qualify because land registry documents are missing for the area and a range of requirements on car parking, access roads and sewerage connections are “impossible” to meet, Orly Noy, a spokeswoman, wrote in the Haaretz newspaper last month.
She added that Palestinian areas of East Jerusalem lacked 70km of sewage pipes and that not a single new road had been paved in their neighbourhoods since Israel’s occupation in 1967.

A planning map of East Jerusalem drawn up recently by the Jerusalem municipality came to light last month, as Mr Barkat was promising to legalise buildings, showing that more than 300 homes – most of them in Silwan – were facing imminent demolition.
http://desertpeace.wordpress.com/2010/02/09/israeli-settler-jews-get-go-ahead-to-break-the-law/

You too can lose your home due to foreclosure for Israel!

http://intifada-palestine.com/

‘CHRISTIAN’ ZIONISTS KEEPING ‘THE DREAM’ ALIVE

Hagee’s Gifts to Pro-Settler Groups

Recently, Max Blumenthal uncovered that Elie Wiesel accepted a $500,000 gift from John Hagee, the anti-Semitic pro-settler televangelist. Wiesel appears to have resisted Hagee’s blandishments to come to San Antonio to speak to his congregation as he admits in a video available at the Hagee website. But once Hagee waved that $500,000 check in his face, and after Bernie Madoff had already cleaned him out, Wiesel saw the benefit of making common cause with the Christian Zionist zealot. Wiesel is also a useful tool for Hagee, as the former provides the latter that veneer of Jewish respectability he needs in the face of massive criticism of his motives and his record of strange statements about Jews and the Holocaust.
Thanks to Didi Remez, I’ve been doing some digging among Hagee’s other gifts to Israeli organizations. In fairness, he does give gifts to hospitals and absorption centers, which are perfectly reasonable. But it is notable how much money and how extensively he gives to pro-settler and extreme rightist Israeli groups.

Besides Im Tirtzu ($200,000 over two years), the radical right smearmeisters who put a horn on Naomi Chazan in a disgusting ad in the Jerusalem Post and Hebrew language press, there are these others (some of which are listed here on page 12):

Gush Katif, $200,000

Young Israel, $150,000

Shurat Ha-Din, $100,000

Nefesh B’Nefesh, $1,000,000

Ariel (settlement), $500,000

Gush Etzion, $150,000

Gush Katif funds support the settler malcontents who resisted the Gaza withdrawal. It offers them financial support to continue their resistance to territorial compromise and defiance of the directives of Israel’s democratically elected government.
Young Israel is one of the most virulent U.S. Orthodox groups supporting the most extreme of the settlers and settlements.

Shurat Ha-Din is an Israeli-American group using “lawfare” to wage war against the Arab world. It sues Arab banks alleging that they accept deposits from militant groups in violation of U.S. law. The group also hosts “Intellitours” to Israel which include meetings with Shin Bet assassins who’ve perpetrated targeted assassinations.

Nefesh B’Nefesh resettles new immigrants who make aliya. It makes a special point of directing these immigrants to West Bank settlements and subsidizes their lives there. In effect, this is yet another means of providing ideological and financial support to the settler movement.

Ariel and Gush Etzion are two of the larger settlements in the West Bank. Hagee’s Ariel gift supported a new conference center. Again, providing critical infrastructure support strengthens the settler enterprise.

I should add that these are only the publicly announced gifts. Neither Christians United for Israel nor John Hagee Ministries file 990 IRS forms, claiming they are exempt due to being a church. As far as CUFI is concerned, this appears to be an abuse of the system as it is certainly not a church. Rather it is a pro-Israel political-theological group advocating on behalf of the settler movement and Israel’s far right. Of course, the IRS does nothing to police such abuse as I’ve noted here in similar cases regarding other pro-settler U.S. non-profits.

Since Hagee’s giving is not transparent he could be giving much, much more and to even more radical groups than the ones he publicly acknowledges. Only he knows and he’s not telling.

Maybe we should ask Elie Wiesel how he feels being among such a hit parade of Israeli Jewish extremists, not to mention taking tzedakah from the bizarro Hagee himself.

http://desertpeace.wordpress.com/

Rebuilding the protest tent in Sheikh Jarrah / Rebatir a nouveau la tente de protestation a Sheikh Jarrah, 02.02.2010

Palestinians residents and activists rebuild a protest tent of Palestinian families who were evicted from their homes in Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood by Jewish settlers, after the Israeli police confiscated the tent earlier that morning.


Les residents palestiniens et des activistes ont rebati aujourd'hui la tente de protestation des familles palestiniennes qui ont ete evacuees de force de leurs maisons dans le quartier de Jerusalem Est de Sheikh jarrah. Depuis des mois, elles maintiennent une presence en face de leur maison qui a ete de suite occupee par les colons. La matin meme, la tente avait ete confisquee par la police israelienne.
http://chroniquespalestine.blogspot.com/2010/02/rebuilding-protest-tent-in-sheikh.html

Jewish settlers burn Palestinian property, IOF damage land and detain citizens

QALQILIA, (PIC)-- Jewish armed settlers wreaked havoc in the village of Ematin, Qalqilia district, in a pre dawn raid on Thursday that complemented their sabotage acts in the same village over the past two weeks.

Eyewitnesses said that the settlers from a nearby settlement burnt four vehicles in the village while people were asleep before swiftly withdrawing.

Villagers said that the vehicles were three cars and a tractor.

Meanwhile, the Israeli occupation forces (IOF) rounded up 12 Palestinians in various West Bank areas at an early hour on Thursday during which they searched homes and harassed civilians.

The IOF soldiers on Wednesday night bulldozed four dunums of cultivated land lots in Safa north of Beit Ummar village, Al-Khalil district.

Local sources said that the IOF troops commenced their destruction without prior notice, noting that the land was cultivated with fruitful trees.

In the Gaza Strip, the IOF troops advanced into northeast of Rafah city for a few hours on Wednesday afternoon amidst intensified firing at civilian neighborhoods.

PIC reporter said that the soldiers mounting three armored vehicles escorted bulldozers that damaged cultivated fields.

The troops stationed east of Rafah fired at citizens' homes and IOF artillery fired at agricultural areas east of Jabalia north of the Gaza Strip inflicting material damage but no casualties.

IOF F-16 warplanes flew at low altitudes over the Strip on Wednesday and penetrated the sound barrier spreading fear among civilians especially children.
http://uprootedpalestinians.blogspot.com/

PRISONER OF HOPE

Facing the news on Palestine each day can make even the most jovial Irish person melancholy at times. So if yur looking for the usual banter and craic, it's not here today. Instead a somber rant on Zionists, religion, and the world:

I was raised in a Christian family, like all good Irish. My views on religion have changed immensely as I’ve grown older. During the troubles in Ireland, even the non religious Catholics embraced the Catholic religion and went to mass, more so as a statement of defiance than anything else. Our religion was under attack, and that drew more of us in to protect it and defend it, this works in all other religions as well. When people of a certain faith believe their faith is under attack the religious become more religious, and even the non-believers will defend it to the core. Ireland or the Middle East, same deal.

I wouldn’t say I’m anything these days, no affiliation with any organised religion, not after the horrors I’ve seen in this world that revolve around “so called” religious people and their “various religions.” I now have my own family, and although none of us are “religious” in the real sense of the word, we instead try to live lives that help other people. This is our families “religion.” But, when I was younger religion and the world itself, had a different meaning altogether. Remember when you were only small, and your parents protected you from knowing of the evil in the world. You’d look at picture books of the people around the world, their different cultures. They always appeared so happy in the books, no troubles at all, everyone was free to live their lives despite their cultural and religious differences. Still, if you listened late at night you could hear the hushed talk of the adults, and you knew all was not as it seemed. That this world was not truly the place you thought it was. This is the beginning of innocence lost. Of coming to terms with the very sad fact that most of those people in the picture books in fact hated each other. If for no other stupid reason than a difference in religion. God wars, just like at home in Ireland the 800 years of Protestant vs. Catholic. Sadly, the world was just like us, filed with hatred for those who are “different.”

As you grow you soon see that there is always an aggressor and a victim, rarely are the two sides pitted against each other equal in strength and military ability. You begin to realise that as some groups of people gain power, they easily toss aside any memories of when they themselves were once the victim. And in a bizarre twist of fate, become the aggressor themselves. This is an awful side effect of power, but not every group of people have this desire. However, those who have made the transition from victim to aggressor believe with all their being, that should their own victims ever become equal, or gain any real power, that they will do to them what they have done. This is their guilty conscience at work along with racist fears and paranoia. It was the same in Ireland. Protestants believed that the cruelty they had towards us would be turned against them once we became equal. But, the REAL truth is that people just want to be equal and treated fairly, and once they get equality then they just get on with building their country and living their lives. They don’t want to then create another situation where they have to keep fighting the same foe for all of eternity. That is not human nature. They only want to live like everyone else. It really is that simple! Only the aggressors cannot get over their irrational fear that their victims will seek a horrible revenge. To that paranoid thought, I’d refer to what happened here and in South Africa for evidence that people just want to move on from conflict and live in peace equally.

And this got me to thinking about Israel and its behaviour and moreover, those who support Israel’s behaviour. How difficult it must be for Jews both in Israel and outside of Israel to read the news online each day. The continued bashing of Israel’s actions, the criticism, the anger, the outrage, that Jews feel hated. I get that. No one wants to be hated, even hard core Zionists at “some level” surely have feelings, even if they never speak of them. It’s human nature to want to be loved and accepted. But in order to RECIEVE love and acceptance from the world, you must first exhibit love and acceptance OF the world. This is where Israel and Zionists get it so very wrong.

Instead, Israel spends billions on bribing politicians in every country, creating hasbara programs, armies of online bloggers, talking heads on TV, attempting to change laws pertaining to our civil rights and free speech, attempting to censor bloggers, papers and TV stations, and a whole host of other propaganda techniques in a failing effort to win support and “change” people’s minds. And with each of these very “forceful” attempts, it only works against them, in spades. Because with each of these attempts yet another person is converted into the anti-Zionist/Israel camp. Yet another person becomes aware of the evil policies that stem from a sectarian religious fanatical state that acts with impunity and worse, endangers the world for the rest of us peons.

So, to Israel and those who support blindly its racist and illegal actions, I say this; what happened to Judaism? What happened to those who became free from the Nazis? Did they go out into the world and fight to change it, so that the horrors of the Nazi’s would never happen again to them OR anyone else?? That was the mistake. We don’t want to hate you; we’re just sick and tired of what you continue to do each day in the name of your new and improved Zionist religion. We hate the fact that you have become what you once fought against, the very evil you despised. We are in “utter awe” that you cannot see what you are doing, that you are so blinded by your hatred. And most of all, we are in “awe” of what you are doing to your own selves, your own history, your own legacy in this world. What will history say about you and your actions against your fellow Semites? Do you even care? Probably not, but you should. This Zionist mentality will destroy you and be your downfall. It’s already happening, bit by bit. I know you tell yourselves that after you finish your illegal actions of ethnic cleansing in the region, when you are done taking what land you want from others, when your best friend America helps to get you off from War Crimes charges and the Goldstone Report. When time passes and the world is not as focused on Palestine as it is now. That you will get away with what you have done and are doing, you think things will change for you. That people will forget. Again, you only need look to your very own history for the answer. Has the world forgotten about Hitler and the Holocaust? The same will stand true for your own actions against Palestine, you are writing new passages in history each day, and those passages will not reflect kindly on Jews or Israel. Israel and its blind supporters should think about that for longer than a few minutes.

Simply return to the 67 borders and live in peace. This is even Hamas position, not to mention the majority of the worlds position. All the world wants from Israel and Jews is “humanity” because with humanity comes all the rest; an end to the occupation, the siege, the ethnic cleansing, the illegal settlements, the hatred. With humanity, comes respect, equality, and love for others. Israel should join us in humanity and instead of killing their neighbours, embrace them, whilst the door is still open and the welcome mat out. Experience what it feels like to wake up and not be hated, but instead be respected for changing ways, for seeing the light. Maybe I wrote this because somewhere in my non-believer soul, I thought of that little child I once was, years ago, when I saw the pictures of people around the world in that book, and marvelled at their unique differences, when I thought the world was a decent accepting place. So, I’ll end with this; A few days ago Desmond Tutu was on television, he was speaking about “hope” and he said something that struck me. He said that he was a “Prisoner of Hope.” So, that is what I shall try to be, that will be my “religion.” I am, a prisoner of hope.
http://irish4palestine.blogspot.com/

Jewish Nazism!

by attendingtheworld
I know the word infuriates these pigs.. just like the picture below infuriated me. These pigs deserve to be at the bottom of the Mediterranean.

KIRYAT ARBA, West Bank (Reuters) – Israeli inspectors trying to enforce a government moratorium on new building starts in Jewish settlements ran into defiance Tuesday at an enclave in the occupied West Bank.

About a dozen settlers challenged several inspectors who had come to halt construction at a building site in the settlement of Kiryat Arba, adjacent to the West Bank city of Hebron.

“You should be ashamed of yourselves,” one settler shouted as an inspector, accompanied by a policeman and an army officer, surveyed the hilltop tract where several red-roofed homes stood next to empty plots.

There was no violence, but also no sign that settlers in Kiryat Arba, who claim a biblical right to the land, would obey the stop-work orders.

Under pressure from the United States, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced a 10-month freeze on new housing projects last week in an attempt to persuade Palestinians to return to U.S.-sponsored peace talks suspended a year ago. [Palestinians have been negotiating for 60 years and all they keep getting is less land, evictions, ethnic cleansing and so on. The Apes and their children want us to believe that they are negotiating peace? Hardly! It's time to take back what was illegally robbed from the Palestinians throw these pigs and apes out!]

The moratorium does not apply to some 3,000 settler housing units already under construction in the West Bank, nor to areas of the territory that Israel annexed to its Jerusalem municipality after a 1967 war.

Settlers at the site in Kiryat Arba argued that foundations had already been laid and since construction had effectively begun, the stop-work orders did not apply.

“It’s a mistake. Call your superiors,” one settler implored.

After a brief standoff, the inspectors got into their jeeps and left to the derisive applause of settlers who lined the sides of the dirt road.

“Go home,” they shouted as the vehicles pulled away.

In East Jerusalem, scuffles erupted between Jewish settlers and Palestinians as the settlers cleaned part of a home an Israeli court has awarded them in what Palestinians say is part of a campaign to drive them out of the city.

An Israeli man suffered a minor head injury after being smacked with a wooden plank, television footage showed. [Amazingly, the issue now is how one thug Ape had been hurt! Not the fact that Palestinians have been thrown out of their homes of 60 years! All in the name of the falsehood of "biblical" right!]

The house was the seventh in East Jerusalem awarded this year to settlers following Israeli court battles.

United Nations Secretary-General Ban ki-Moon “expressed his dismay at the continuation of demolitions, evictions and the installment of Israeli settlers in Palestinian neighborhoods in occupied East Jerusalem,” a written statement said.

“Provocative actions such as these create inevitable tensions, undermine trust, often have tragic human consequences and make resuming negotiations and achieving a two state solution more difficult,” it added.

(Writing by Jeffrey Heller and Allyn Fisher-Ilan; Editing by Paul Taylor)
http://windowintopalestine.blogspot.com

Photo of the Day: What does Barak mean regarding the peace talks?

Israeli MP attacks Obama for being 'racist' over settlements

As usual the US will do nothing about Israel's flagrant breaches of international law with its latest announcement of the expansion of the Gilo settlement comlex - part of its plan to envelop and then strangle East Jerusalem. But the timidity of the Obama in the face of Israeli colonialism is still too much for the zionists hence the outburst from a member of parliament by the name of Danny Danon, accusing Obama of being 'racist'.

Now where did he get that line from? Probably the right-wing nuts in the US who decided Obama was a racist because he chided a police dept. after one of its police officers wrongly arrested a black professor going into his own house. The rag bag bunch of neocons, racists and anti-semites that make up the so called Tea Party movement in the US are of course right behind the Israeli-sponsored criminality and oppression that is the hallmark of the occupation of Palestine.

MK Danny Danon lashed out at U.S. President Barack Obama on Wednesday, as the lawmaker participated in groundbreaking ceremony for a new housing complex for Jews in east Jerusalem.

"President Obama should not interfere with the rights of the Jewish people to live in Jerusalem," said Danon. "This ... is a racist demand, saying that Jews cannot live in Jerusalem, only Arabs."

The ceremony kicked off construction of 124 new apartments in a Jewish housing complex called Nof Zion, or View of Zion, near the Arab neighborhood of Jabel Mukaber.

Much in the same vein, a US zionist politician also present at the ceremony accused Obama of being a segregationist - which to put it mildly is a somewhat insensitive remark to make to the US's first black president. The Israelis certainly know how to lose friends and influence.

At the ceremony, New York State Assemblyman Dov Hikind said Obama's call to stop Jewish settlement amounted to segregation.