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Another Great Cartoon from www.whatnowtoons.com
A great deal of crap is going on, but this caught my attention and just about sums things up:
WATCH: Bulldozers demolish Palestinian homes outside J’lem
by: Moriel Rothman on December 8th, 2011 | 5 Comments »
This post was originally published on the +972 blog.
From Al-Khalayleh, a Palestinian village near the settlement of Giva’at Ze’ev, outside of Jerusalem – A group of young men are swinging shovels and hammers at the walls of a house – their own house.
They had watched as the bulldozers tore down their neighbors’ homes and buildings early the same morning, and decided to destroy part of their house themselves. They were doing this, on one hand, to “not let the Israelis have the pleasure of doing it,” they told me.
But more than that, they were doing so with the hope that the authorities would decide that enough of the house was gone, and allow them to keep one room. Also, this way they perhaps could avoid the fine Palestinians are commonly forced to pay- for the cost of the demolition of their house.
Their desperate efforts were in vain: after the bulldozer finished across the street, border police swarmed over to the house where the boys were swinging their tools.
Everyone was cleared out of the area and the bulldozer went to work flattening the entire structure.
This specific demolition, along with four others, took place Tuesday morning (December 6, 2011) in the village of Al-Khalayleh, but the story could describe hundreds of similar demolitions that have taken place in recent years throughout the occupied territories. The story is as follows:
A Palestinian family builds a new house or building. Sometimes they try to get a building permit, other times they do not bother. Either way the result is the same: permission is not granted and the building is constructed “illegally.”
According to the Israeli planning group Bimkom, in 1972, 97 percent of the building permits submitted by Palestinians were approved. By 2000, the rate was down to 2.7 percent. Since 2000, the acceptance rate has averaged somewhere around 5 percent.
The building is then declared illegal by Israeli authorities – whether it be the Civil Aministration in Area C, as was the case in Al-Khalayleh, or the municipality in East Jerusalem, as was the case in two demolitions that took place the day before (December 5) in Wadi Asoul and Beit Hanina (where, as the homeowner explained, “They dug into the concrete around the home also, so that it will be impossible to rebuild.”)
Sometimes the families are warned in advance that there will be a demolition, sometimes the bureaucracy takes place over their heads or behind their backs. Either way, they rarely know exactly when the demolition will happen.
And there was indeed a current of surprised panic in Al-Khalayleh, humming around the sea of dark blue uniforms and bright yellow bulldozers, dotted with Palestinian villagers holding up cell phones to film.
Everyone was yelling, making phone calls and demanding to see papers. Then the engine of the bulldozer clicked on, the black traction started to move, and the crowd grew silent – unless maybe it had been silenced by the sound of cracking concrete.
Within five minutes, the demolition was finished and the police escorted the bulldozers 100 meters up the street, to destroy the next structure.
And then the next. All in all five structures – two of them residential houses – were destroyed in the span of a few hours.
As the final structure was being demolished, the owner of one of the houses came up to me and asked:
“What can I do now?”
“I… don’t know.”
But in fact I did know. Nothing. The answer is nothing. The demolition was, in essence, a punishment for being Palestinian. He has no option to go to court, because the only courts he has access to are the occupation courts. If he rebuilds, his house will likely be destroyed again. And in all likelihood, the bulldozers will return soon to destroy some of his neighbors’ houses as well.
If trends can tell us anything, these demolitions over the past few days are just the beginning of a renewed wave of destruction. Is this governmental decision bolstered by the realization that most of the Israeli population will never hear about the demolitions, and that many of those who do hear about them will choose to ignore these stories of destruction? That the issue will be written off as “too distant” or “too complicated” or even “too depressing?”
It is not too distant – these demolitions are taking place inside and around Jerusalem, a matter of minutes in a taxi for an Israeli living in West Jerusalem.
It is not too complicated – these demolitions do not involve “terrorism” and “deterrence” and “death.” Even the argument that “Palestinians are illegally taking over land” cannot be applied here, as all of these structures were within the municipal borders of the Palestinian village itself.
These demolitions are simply instances of government offices wielding bureaucratic force to demolish homes built by Palestinians without a permit, which they would not have received even had they requested one. Why? Perhaps to exert control. Perhaps to remind the Palestinians that this land is not their land, not even the villages they live in. Perhaps to sow helplessness, despair, depression.
And these demolitions are certainly depressing. But they are not “too depressing,” especially for those of us with the privilege to go home at night – to a home that is not and will not be in danger of demolition. It is our obligation as Israelis, as wielders of such privilege, to see to it that these demolitions do not continue as planned, whether that be through lobbying, writing, witnessing, posting, filming, discussing, protesting or some other way. We cannot sit silently.
Moriel Rothman is an American-Israeli writer and activist. He lives in Jerusalem, and is active with Rabbis for Human Rights, who recently submitted a petition asking the Israeli Civil Administration to allow Palestinians in Area C to plan for themselves, rather than depend on permission from the Israeli system.
From Al-Khalayleh, a Palestinian village near the settlement of Giva’at Ze’ev, outside of Jerusalem – A group of young men are swinging shovels and hammers at the walls of a house – their own house.
They had watched as the bulldozers tore down their neighbors’ homes and buildings early the same morning, and decided to destroy part of their house themselves. They were doing this, on one hand, to “not let the Israelis have the pleasure of doing it,” they told me.
But more than that, they were doing so with the hope that the authorities would decide that enough of the house was gone, and allow them to keep one room. Also, this way they perhaps could avoid the fine Palestinians are commonly forced to pay- for the cost of the demolition of their house.
Their desperate efforts were in vain: after the bulldozer finished across the street, border police swarmed over to the house where the boys were swinging their tools.
Everyone was cleared out of the area and the bulldozer went to work flattening the entire structure.
This specific demolition, along with four others, took place Tuesday morning (December 6, 2011) in the village of Al-Khalayleh, but the story could describe hundreds of similar demolitions that have taken place in recent years throughout the occupied territories. The story is as follows:
A Palestinian family builds a new house or building. Sometimes they try to get a building permit, other times they do not bother. Either way the result is the same: permission is not granted and the building is constructed “illegally.”
According to the Israeli planning group Bimkom, in 1972, 97 percent of the building permits submitted by Palestinians were approved. By 2000, the rate was down to 2.7 percent. Since 2000, the acceptance rate has averaged somewhere around 5 percent.
The building is then declared illegal by Israeli authorities – whether it be the Civil Aministration in Area C, as was the case in Al-Khalayleh, or the municipality in East Jerusalem, as was the case in two demolitions that took place the day before (December 5) in Wadi Asoul and Beit Hanina (where, as the homeowner explained, “They dug into the concrete around the home also, so that it will be impossible to rebuild.”)
Sometimes the families are warned in advance that there will be a demolition, sometimes the bureaucracy takes place over their heads or behind their backs. Either way, they rarely know exactly when the demolition will happen.
And there was indeed a current of surprised panic in Al-Khalayleh, humming around the sea of dark blue uniforms and bright yellow bulldozers, dotted with Palestinian villagers holding up cell phones to film.
Everyone was yelling, making phone calls and demanding to see papers. Then the engine of the bulldozer clicked on, the black traction started to move, and the crowd grew silent – unless maybe it had been silenced by the sound of cracking concrete.
Within five minutes, the demolition was finished and the police escorted the bulldozers 100 meters up the street, to destroy the next structure.
And then the next. All in all five structures – two of them residential houses – were destroyed in the span of a few hours.
As the final structure was being demolished, the owner of one of the houses came up to me and asked:
“What can I do now?”
“I… don’t know.”
But in fact I did know. Nothing. The answer is nothing. The demolition was, in essence, a punishment for being Palestinian. He has no option to go to court, because the only courts he has access to are the occupation courts. If he rebuilds, his house will likely be destroyed again. And in all likelihood, the bulldozers will return soon to destroy some of his neighbors’ houses as well.
If trends can tell us anything, these demolitions over the past few days are just the beginning of a renewed wave of destruction. Is this governmental decision bolstered by the realization that most of the Israeli population will never hear about the demolitions, and that many of those who do hear about them will choose to ignore these stories of destruction? That the issue will be written off as “too distant” or “too complicated” or even “too depressing?”
It is not too distant – these demolitions are taking place inside and around Jerusalem, a matter of minutes in a taxi for an Israeli living in West Jerusalem.
It is not too complicated – these demolitions do not involve “terrorism” and “deterrence” and “death.” Even the argument that “Palestinians are illegally taking over land” cannot be applied here, as all of these structures were within the municipal borders of the Palestinian village itself.
These demolitions are simply instances of government offices wielding bureaucratic force to demolish homes built by Palestinians without a permit, which they would not have received even had they requested one. Why? Perhaps to exert control. Perhaps to remind the Palestinians that this land is not their land, not even the villages they live in. Perhaps to sow helplessness, despair, depression.
And these demolitions are certainly depressing. But they are not “too depressing,” especially for those of us with the privilege to go home at night – to a home that is not and will not be in danger of demolition. It is our obligation as Israelis, as wielders of such privilege, to see to it that these demolitions do not continue as planned, whether that be through lobbying, writing, witnessing, posting, filming, discussing, protesting or some other way. We cannot sit silently.
Moriel Rothman is an American-Israeli writer and activist. He lives in Jerusalem, and is active with Rabbis for Human Rights, who recently submitted a petition asking the Israeli Civil Administration to allow Palestinians in Area C to plan for themselves, rather than depend on permission from the Israeli system.
5 Responses to “WATCH: Bulldozers demolish Palestinian homes outside J’lem”
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Oakland Police Trained Alongside Bahrain Military and Israeli Forces Prior to Violent Occupy Oakland Raid
by: David Harris-Gershon on December 4th, 2011 | 4 Comments »
Militarized riot police stand against Occupy Oakland on October 29, 2011. Photo by Soozarty1.
The occasion was Urban Shield 2011, an annual training competition which gathers heavily militarized police from the United States and across the globe to explore the latest in tactical responses and to promote collaboration. It’s a training that northern California police departments credited for their “effective teamwork” in dealing repressively with Occupy Oakland.
Max Blumenthal, who broke this story in al-Akhbar in an exhaustive piece on the militarization of U.S. police, describes the units alongside which multiple California departments trained before violently crushing Occupy Oakland:
Training alongside the American police departments at Urban Shield was the Yamam, an Israeli Border Police unit that claims to specialize in “counter-terror” operations but is better known for its extra-judicial assassinations of Palestinian militant leaders and long record of repression and abuses in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. Urban Shield also featured a unit from the military of Bahrain, which had just crushed a largely non-violent democratic uprising by opening fire on protest camps and arresting wounded demonstrators when they attempted to enter hospitals. While the involvement of Bahraini soldiers in the drills was a novel phenomenon, the presence of quasi-military Israeli police – whose participation in Urban Shield was not reported anywhere in US media – reflected a disturbing but all-too-common feature of the post-9/11 American security landscape.That landscape is being revealed in full relief as militarized SWAT police across America continuously crack down on nonviolent, peaceful Occupy Wall Street protesters. Indeed, excessive, coordinated force – unparallelled in contemporary American history – is being used against both protesters merely assembling to air their grievances and against journalists attempting to merely chronicle such protests.
One needs to look no further than Urban Shield 2011 to see why police departments across the country are beginning to resemble repressive forces in countries such as, say, Bahrain.
Indeed, Urban Shield 2011 was held on the University of California, Berkeley’s campus weeks before university police used excessive force on students occupying a campus green. One of the departments that participated in Urban Shield 2011 was the University of California Police Department, Berkeley. Is it any wonder, then, why campus police brutally beat and arrested students in early November in a crackdown on its Occupy Cal encampment?
Occupy Wall Street is not going anywhere. Even as groups are evicted from their encampments, protest actions are creatively expanding – from reclaiming foreclosed-upon homes to flash occupations of commercial districts.
As these nonviolent protests expand, it will be telling how long Americans will tolerate militarized police responses to what is becoming one of this generation’s civil rights movements.
4 Responses to “Oakland Police Trained Alongside Bahrain Military and Israeli Forces Prior to Violent Occupy Oakland Raid”
- Wow! This is precious drivel
- This sure looks like we are headed down the road to fascism because it’s the only way the 1% will be able to control the rabble that refuses to be victimized!
Thanks for sharing this.
- I though our tax dollars went to train law enforcement to protect our country from “Terrorist’s”. But now it appears that they use the training to crack the heads of peaceful US citizens protesting and flexing their Supposedly Constitutional First Amendment Rights to gather and to protest the grievances that they have with our government. History will eventually show that Law Enforcement is on the wrong side of this issue and that they have violated our Constitutional rights that they are sworn to uphold all for $$$$
- I think this has been going on for a long time. I was shocked when the republican national convention met here in St. Paul and all kinds of military officers and sheriffs and who knows what turned out. You couldn’t tell who they were, name tags were not shown; they were all fitted out in bullet-proof vests and face shields and armor and carrying weapons of various kinds. I think many of these supplemented the local police force.
People like Amy Goodman were arrested despite her clearly (on video) showing her credentials, and so were some of the people working with her.
Ordinary people were intimidated. A friend walking across the High Bridge, a long way from the convention center, was told he couldn’t cross; when he questioned it, the cop offered to handcuff him. Many others just walking or going to work, some to an event on nearby Harriet Island, were stopped and many rounded up
What do we do against armed opponents?
Thank you
http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/news/israeli-government-approves-first-bedouin-ecovillage-in-negev-1.399751
When Holocaust Inc. ensures that every year in America features a plethora of Content that is focused on the Holocaust, to keep Americans blindly supporting Israel, yet we are never made to remember that for 2000 years, ALL the Jewish suffering has been at the hands of Christians; from decadent Roman emperors, to Orthodox Christian emperors from Byzantium to the incompetent Tsars of St. Petersburg; Catholics of Italy and France, and Protestants of Germany and beyond. Christians persecuting Jews, not Arabs. Not Muslims.
We conveniently forget that the story of the Exodus and Exile, slavery in Babylon, is but a Christian myth. It never happened, it’s not even Jewish in origin. The ancient Jews of Israel, Judea and Samaria never left. They fought with the Muslims to overthrow Byzantium and establish the Caliphate. They converted to Islam, with the Temple destroyed, Israel a memory, and facing the taxes, Jews and Christians had to pay that Muslims did not, why not? Their descendants are still in Palestine, and were in 1948.
The question is, who are all these European and American Jews who think they can claim Arab land as their homeland? If the Biblical Jews never left, who are they, these modern interlopers from abroad? And what sort of claim can be made after 2000 years, practically the entire arc of civilization? If that becomes a legal precedent, what would become of the borders of the Americas? The US? China? Russia? Or, more cynically, native peoples worldwide?
Israel hasn’t had a clear victory since 1973. It’s occupation of Lebanon, including the murder of over a thousand Palestinians there, created Hizbollah. The siege of Gaza produced Hamas. America’s blind support for Israel and its support of corrupt Arab regimes brought down the World Trade Center and killed 3000 people. America’s war on Iraq and Afghanistan didn’t free either country, but it made lots of enemies for us, and no friends for Israel, and now the Arab spring is finally bringing a version of democracy to the Middle East, and where is Israel and Washington but on the sidelines fretting that the Arabs “aren’t ready” and that Mubarak should have been supported.
Any dictator that takes our money is a dictator we should support?
The future of the Middle East is Arab, and Islamic. The Arabs will never accept a European American Jewish state on Arab land.
The question is, is anybody in America looking far enough ahead?
What are the consequences for our blindly supporting Israel?
When Israel does something stupid, that sets off the war they can’t contain, and the US takes a fall trying to come to Israel’s aid, will American’s become unnaturally introspective, or will we seek to find a scapegoat to take the fall? Will we accept that we brought this upon us, or will we let the demagogues among us convince us that we were betrayed? That someone subverted our foreign policy to benefit Israel, at our expense? Who would the scapegoat be?
Think of the iconic images and how they could be repurposed as “evidence” that AIPAC betrayed America. That tape of Obama being lectured by Netanyahu, saying nothing, clench jawed. Could that not be used as “evidence” that Obama was terrified of the Israel lobby, “proof” that the President was powerless against it? What about the words of Helen Thomas, after the Israeli’s murdered 9 unarmed Turkish peace activists? All she said was that the Israelis should go back where they came from, but the conservative media acted as if she had said they should go back to Auschwitz and Bergen Belsen, and she was sacked. Could this not be repurposed as “evidence” of the overarching power of the Jewish lobby to silence dissent?
There is no natural Jewish homeland, for anyone born beyond the boundaries of the ancient borders of Palestine, and descended from the Jews of the Bible, who never left. The homeland of the so-called Diaspora, is where each member was born, and where he can trace his family. Thinking otherwise is to encourage a delusion that will not only destroy the unsustainable lie that is Israel, but one that will burn away the Diaspora as well.
After all, if Christianity has persecuted the Jews since the time of Rome, it is not inconceivable to the thinking mind that the last act of Western Civilization will be an anti-Semitic holocaust that will make Hitler’s effort seem like a practice run.
When are we going to start thinking of the consequences of blindly supporting a European American Jewish state on Arab land? It is Arab land, and there will be consequences. People are going to be killed. Isn’t it about time we started to think about the consequences and to stop enabling the delusion?