progressiveissuesblog

Israel Moral Corruption

Updated 2024-08-26

2024-08-16 When rabbis say nothing in the face of abuse    In a world where rabbinic proclamations appear regularly, rabbinical silence becomes a statement. While there is disagreement about the appropriateness of rabbis making political endorsements, there is a consensus that it is a rabbinical responsibility to promote moral behavior. In this context, the lack of rabbinic response to the campaign to protest the Israeli army’s investigating accusations of sexual and other kinds of abuse of Hamas prisoners is significant.   https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/when-rabbis-say-nothing-in-the-face-of-abuse/ar-AA1oUV0e?

2024-07-15 Israel Continues to Evade Accountability After Mawasi Massacre, Says Analyst    The Israeli military carried out one of its deadliest attacks in weeks when it bombed al-Mawasi in Khan Younis — designated as a “safe zone” — killing at least 90 Palestinians and injuring hundreds more on Saturday. Israel claimed it was targeting Hamas military chief Mohammed Deif, but the group denied that Deif had been hit. Israel also struck a makeshift mosque during noon prayer in the Shati refugee camp in west Gaza City, killing 20, and a United Nations school sheltering thousands of displaced Palestinians in the Nuseirat refugee camp, killing 22. We speak with writer and analyst Muhammad Shehada, chief of communications at Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor, who says, “We’ve got a situation where Israel is being told, ‘You can do whatever you want, anything you want at all.’”https://truthout.org/video/israel-continues-to-evade-accountability-after-mawasi-massacre-says-analyst/

2024-05-04 Palestine Talks | Chris Hedges on the moral corruption of Israel and the “savagery” of violence   In this episode of Palestine Talks, we speak to writer and activist Chris Hedges as he discusses the philosophical nature of the evil underlying Israel’s violence against the Palestinian people, and the radical dehumanisation of Palestinians based on his own troubling experience covering stories in war zones.   He also discusses how American media, paralleling the propaganda of the Israeli lobby, deliberately trivialises such violence and misleads the public. As Hedges points out, this reflects how such media including outlets that enjoy a “liberal” or “progressive” reputation like The New York Times “embraces American militarism”, contemptuous of both human life and the possibility of peace grounded in actual principles of justice. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qyErcPn2VIU&list=PLUW304lJeu3Vg_nM0WQfWDZTDyu6h6PlD&index=5

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Categorized Directory: News and Articles about Israel- Palestine Conflict

Palestine and Israel

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Specific Issues Index

from Creating Better World

Israel – Home Destructions

Updated 2024-07-25

2020-03-15 End Home Demolitions – An Introduction    As an Israeli peace and human rights organization, ICAHD focuses its activities around resistance to Israel’s policy of demolishing Palestinian homes, both in Israel and in the Occupied Palestine Territory (OPT). The demolition policy is part of Israel’s attempt to Judaize Palestine, to transform an Arab country into a Jewish one. During and after the Nakba of 1948, when the state of Israel was established, it systematically demolished about 52,000 Palestinian homes, more than 530 entire villages, towns and urban neighborhoods. Since the beginning of the Occupation in 1967, Israel has demolished another 55,000 homes in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza. Thousands more continue to be demolished inside Israel itself.

Israel’s policy of house demolitions represents the essence of the “conflict”: one people displacing another; ICAHD’s campaign of resistance has proven a powerful and effective vehicle for holding Israel accountable.     https://icahd.org/2020/03/15/end-home-demolitions-an-introduction/

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Categorized Directory: News and Articles about Israel- Palestine Conflict

Palestine and Israel

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Specific Issues Index

from Creating Better World

Israel Holocaust Memorial

Updated 2024-07-25

2024-05-07 The Two Lessons of the Holocaust Confront Each Other Over Gaza     Earlier this week Israel marked the Holocaust in an official memorial day ceremony. Sirens blared for one minute across the country, as all Israelis were urged to drop everything, pull their cars to the sides of the road, and observe a minute devoted to ruminating about the Holocaust and its lessons.

Israel is a contradictory place. It holds itself as a model of enlightened democracy, even as it carries out what most human rights organization by now recognize as an apartheid regime. Even in its Declaration of Independence it declared itself to be both democratic and Jewish, clearly a contradiction. This spirit of contradiction animates the most important event in Israel’s public memory, the Holocaust and in the lesson it draws from it.

On the one hand stands the particular lesson, the Holocaust as a reminder that only an independent Jewish state, Israel, can offer true safety to the Jewish people. On the other hand, Israel tries—at least some of the time—to assert a universal lesson from the Holocaust: If a nation like Germany that viewed itself as the most enlightened nation in the world could carry out a genocide, it can happen everywhere, and if we don’t watch out any one of us can get caught up and become complicit in it. Thus, as humans we must pledge to constantly ask ourselves, “What I would have done during the Holocaust?” and follow the example of the Righteous among the Nations.

For Jews across the world such a time has clearly arrived. Now more than ever we are witnessing a confrontation between the two lessons of the Holocaust, with an increasing number of Jews outside of Israel recognizing in the slogan “never again” a deeply universalist commitment to humanity—especially Palestinians oppressed and killed in their name. Organizations such as Jewish Voice for Peace, If Not Now (whose name is a very reference to this conviction), and others consist of Jews who refuse to stand idle while Israel, a state that views itself as the exclusive embodiment of Jewish aspirations, is carrying out genocidal violence in their name. https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/2-lessons-holocaust-gaza

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Categorized Directory: News and Articles about Israel- Palestine Conflict

Palestine and Israel

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Specific Issues Index

from Creating Better World

Israel Government (see also Israel New 2022 Government and Netanyahu)

Updated 2024-07-25

2022-06-23 Quick Facts: Yair Lapid    Born in 1963, Lapid is a former journalist and TV host who entered politics in 2012 with the founding of the center right Yesh Atid (“There Is a Future”) party, which he leads. His father, who was also a prominent journalist and politician, was from what is Serbia today, immigrating to the newly established state of Israel in 1948. Lapid’s mother was a well-known writer whose father immigrated to Palestine from Romania before Israel’s establishment.

Lapid and Yesh Atid were a key part of former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition government from 2013-2014, when Lapid served as finance minister. In December 2014, Netanyahu fired Lapid from his ministerial post as their coalition fell apart.    https://imeu.org/article/quick-facts-yair-lapid

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Categorized Directory: News and Articles about Israel- Palestine Conflict

Palestine and Israel

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Specific Issues Index

from Creating Better World

Israel Environmental Apartheid (also see Apartheid)

Updated 2024-08-26

2024-01-11 Measuring the carbon ‘boot print’ of Israel’s war in Gaza   The planet-warming emissions generated during the first two months of the war in Gaza were greater than the annual carbon footprint of more than 20 of the world’s most climate-vulnerable nations, new research reveals.

The vast majority (over 99%) of the 281,000 metric tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2 equivalent) estimated to have been generated in the first 60 days following the 7 October Hamas attack can be attributed to Israel’s aerial bombardment and ground invasion of Gaza, according to a first-of-its-kind analysis by researchers in the UK and US.

According to the study, which is based on only a handful of carbon-intensive activities and is therefore probably a significant underestimate, the climate cost of the first 60 days of Israel’s military response was equivalent to burning at least 150,000 tonnes of coal.  https://thebulletin.org/2024/01/measuring-the-carbon-boot-print-of-israels-war-in-gaza/#post-heading

2022-11-03 Israel’s Environmental Apartheid in Palestine   Environmental apartheid refers to Israel’s systematic exploitation of the environment in Palestine/Israel and the discriminatory system by which Palestinians are dispossessed of their land, water, and other natural resources while being disproportionately impacted by ecological damage caused by Israel.

Israel’s environmental apartheid is harmful to the climate and violates the human rights of Palestinians, and is part of Israel’s broader system of apartheid against Palestinians, both inside Israel’s internationally recognized borders and in the territories it has militarily occupied since 1967 (the West Bank, East Jerusalem, Gaza). To detract attention from its abuses of Palestinian human rights, Israel engages in “greenwashing,” promoting itself as an eco-friendly country even as its policies and actions cause tremendous harm to the environment and to Palestinians.

According to the United Nations Development Programme: “So pervasive are the effects of the Israeli occupation on the climate vulnerability of Palestinian communities that the occupation – in and of itself – is considered here a ‘risk’, alongside environmental risks such as sea-level rise and altered rainfall patterns.”    https://imeu.org/article/environmental-apartheid-in-palestine

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Categorized Directory: News and Articles about Israel- Palestine Conflict

Palestine and Israel

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Specific Issues Index

from Creating Better World

Israel Democracy

Updated 2024-08-26

2024-06-25 “I No Longer Believe We’re Living in a Democracy. We’re Being Muzzled”      The figures are unequivocal: Since the terror attack on October 7, freedom of speech in Israel has become a privilege reserved for Jews alone. Under the guise of war, the number of indictments for speech crimes has skyrocketed, and hundreds of Arab citizens have been arrested for incitement to terrorism for making critical comments—some of which do not even meet the threshold of criminality. In some instances, the police have bypassed the state prosecution’s oversight of sensitive investigations.https://www.shomrim.news/eng/freedom-of-speech?  

2024-01-05 The myth of Israel’s ‘democracy’ w/Ilan Pappé | The Chris Hedges Report    Israel’s status as a bona fide democracy is often taken to be a self-evident truth, but a more critical look at the history and reality of Zionism calls this into question. After all, how can a democracy exist in a country constitutionally defined as an ethnostate that can only exist through the suppression and gradual elimination of its Others? Israeli historian Ilan Pappé joins The Chris Hedges Report for a discussion on Israel as an inherently colonial, and therefore anti-democratic, project.

Ilan Pappé is a professor with the College of Social Sciences and International Studies at the University of Exeter in the UK, where he directs the European Centre for Palestine Studies, and co-directs the Exeter Centre for Ethno-Political Studies. Prior to coming to the UK, Pappé was a historian and politician in Israel. He is the author of several books, including The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L1PKlV1JMBU  

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Categorized Directory: News and Articles about Israel- Palestine Conflict

Palestine and Israel

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Specific Issues Index

from Creating Better World

Israel – Day After War (see Gaza End Game)

Updated 2024-07-25

2024-06-23 What if Israel’s plan was no ‘day after’ for Gaza all along? | The Bottom Line     Just like the US did in Iraq and Afghanistan, Israel has entered a war in Gaza with vague and overambitious aims.

But what US officials don’t care to admit is that Israel is not thinking about an end to the military phase, and a beginning of a civilian reconstruction plan, argues Nathan Brown, professor of international relations and political science at George Washington University.    Brown tells host Steve Clemons that Israel has purposely designed the carnage in Gaza to be a “forever war” – not as something that will ever be resolved, especially with a “blank cheque” from the US. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fqh3dAoNk20

2024-06-02 Gideon Levy: Israel has achieved nothing with war on Gaza | The Bottom Line      Given a choice between war and getting all its hostages back, Israel has opted for more war, argues Israeli journalist Gideon Levy.  Levy tells host Steve Clemons that Israeli politicians may abandon Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, but even if he was replaced, Israel would continue its war on Gaza and occupation of the Palestinian people as a whole. “Radical change” in Israeli attitude and U.S. support is needed for any improvement in the situation, says Levy.   After Oct. 7, even those on the Israeli left believe that Israel has the right to do whatever it wants, the Haaretz columnist argues. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MLdWRawqiHQ

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Categorized Directory: News and Articles about Israel- Palestine Conflict

Palestine and Israel

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Specific Issues Index

from Creating Better World

Israel Critics 

Updated 2024-08-26

2024-05-25 Palestine Talks | In conversation with Max Blumenthal (Part 1)    In the first of this two-part interview, investigative journalist at The Grayzone and author Max Blumenthal discusses the “genocidal” nature of the Democratic Party, in relation to its support for Israel’s campaign of violence against Palestine. While citing several concrete examples he also illuminates troublesome connections between American mainstream media, government and Israel, including how they work in tandem to vilify Palestinians and mislead the public. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g53T-x1o4OU

2024-05-02 Norman Finkelstein: Everything you know about Israel is wrong    In a recent interview with PoliticsJOE, Norman Finkelstein broke down misconceptions of Israeli society understood in the West – particularly around the popularity of the war on Palestinians and Benjamin Netanyahu. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oyvOlllV_NI

2023-12-04 Albert Einstein and Hannah Arendt warn against fascism in Israel      The letter below, published 75 years ago today in the New York Times, was prescient.   Signed by Albert Einstein and Hannah Arendt among others, it describes the emergence “in the newly created state of Israel” of “a political party closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties”.

It goes on to say: “It is in its actions that the terrorist party betrays its real character; from its past actions we can judge what it may be expected to do in the future.”  It was led by Menachem Begin, who would go on to become Prime Minister of Israel from 1977-1983, presiding over the Sabra and Shatila massacre and beginning the slide to the right which culminated this year in the inclusion of open fascists, in driving seats, in Israel’s coalition government.

Back in 1948 these signatories were “urging all concerned not to support this latest manifestation of fascism”.  Western leaders seem to have learnt nothing and understood nothing about fascism and the Holocaust. “Never again” has morphed into an injunction to turn a blind eye to the atrocities and genocide are now witnessing.

For Einstein’s letter:   https://www.jewishvoiceforlabour.org.uk/article/albert-einstein-and-hannah-arendt-warn-against-fascism-in-israel/

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Categorized Directory: News and Articles about Israel- Palestine Conflict

Palestine and Israel

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Specific Issues Index

from Creating Better World

Israel Boycott (Also see BDS – Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions)

Updated 2024-07-25

Anti-BDS laws – Wikipedia    With regard to the Arab–Israeli conflict, many supporters of the State of Israel have often advocated or implemented anti-BDS laws (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions), which effectively seek to retaliate against people and organizations engaged in boycotts of Israel-affiliated entities. Most organized boycotts of Israel have been led by Palestinians and other Arabs with support from much of the Muslim world. Since the Second Intifada in particular, these efforts have primarily been coordinated at an international level by the Palestinian-led BDS movement (“Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions”), which seeks to mount as much economic pressure on Israel as possible until the Israeli government allows an independent Palestinian state to be established.[1] Anti-BDS laws are designed to make it difficult for anti-Israel people and organizations to participate in boycotts; anti-BDS legal resolutions are symbolic and non-binding parliamentary condemnations, either of boycotts of Israel or of the BDS movement itself. Generally, such condemnations accuse BDS of closeted antisemitism, charging it with pushing a double standard and lobbying for the de-legitimization of Israeli sovereignty, and are often followed by laws targeting boycotts of Israel.

Proponents of anti-BDS laws claim that BDS is a form of antisemitism, and so such laws legislate against hate speech. Opponents claim that Israel’s supporters are engaging in lawfare by lobbying for anti-BDS laws that infringe upon the right to free speech, and conflating anti-Zionism and criticism of Israel with antisemitism.[2]    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-BDS_laws  

U.S States with Laws Against Aid if Communities Boycott Israel  https://www.instagram.com/p/C4jbL2NvYWm/

2022-06-23 US appeals court rules that laws against Israel boycotts don’t violate Constitution     Ruling by St. Louis-based Eighth Circuit court is a major victory for pro-Israel activists who have pushed some 30 states to adopt anti-BDS laws’  https://www.timesofisrael.com/us-appeals-court-rules-that-laws-against-israel-boycotts-dont-violate-constitution/

2019-06-27 BDS under fire: Does your state have anti-boycott legislation?      A myriad of organisations and people across the United States, from faith-based groups to student and labour unions, have signed on to the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement.

What exactly does BDS stand for? Founded in 2005, the Palestinian-led movement seeks to pressure Israel to end its abuses against Palestinians through economic boycotts and other non-violent means.

Yet just as quickly as BDS has gained momentum in the US, so too have efforts to restrict Israel boycotts.  One of the key ways Israel’s supporters have done this is by pushing for legislation that would limit companies, non-profit entities and individuals from boycotting Israel at the state level.  

Middle East Eye has dug up anti-BDS resolutions, bills, laws and executive orders in each state across the US. Using this interactive map below, find out:  Example:

CALIFORNIA  The law:  • Requires businesses entering into contracts with the state worth more than $100,000 to pledge they aren’t violating California’s anti-discrimination laws   • Requires these businesses to pledge they don’t have policies against “the nation and people of Israel”

It was: • Passed by the state legislature in 2016 – and remains in effect https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/US-states-anti-Israel-boycott-legislation-BDS-map-palestine

2019-04-23 US: States Use Anti-Boycott Laws to Punish Responsible Businesses  “States with anti-boycott laws are effectively telling companies that if you do the right thing and disentangle yourselves from settlement abuses, you can’t do business with us,” said Andrea Prasow, deputy US advocacy director at Human Rights Watch. “States should encourage, not sanction, companies that avoid contributing to rights abuses.”

Many United States states are using anti-boycott laws and executive orders to punish companies that refuse to do business with illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank, Human Rights Watch said today. More than 250 million Americans, some 78 percent of the population, live in states with anti-boycott laws or policies.

Twenty-seven states have adopted laws or policies that penalize businesses, organizations, or individuals that engage in or call for boycotts against Israel. The laws or policies in 17 of those states explicitly target not only companies that refuse to do business in or with Israel, but also those that refuse to do business in Israeli settlements. Some states whose laws do not explicitly apply to settlements have also penalized companies that cut settlement ties.

In January 2019, the US Senate passed a bill that endorsed state anti-boycott legislation, including those that encompass settlement business activity. In March, federal lawmakers introduced resolutions in both the Senate and House to condemn boycotts of Israel. None of these initiatives has yet to become US law.  https://www.hrw.org/news/2019/04/23/us-states-use-anti-boycott-laws-punish-responsible-businesses

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Categorized Directory: News and Articles about Israel- Palestine Conflict

Palestine and Israel

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Specific Issues Index

from Creating Better World

Israel AI (also see AI in War)

Updated 2024-07-25

2024-04-09 Israel’s AI Targeting System Reflects the Inhumanity It Was Programmed With      The rise of AI belies the fantasy that we can escape moral culpability by assigning life-or-death decisions to a machine.  

The war in Gaza between Israel and Hamas marked its grim six-month anniversary on Sunday, and one of the most jarring things about this very 21st-century conflict has been the almost daily headlines about Israeli airstrikes obliterating the homes of notable Palestinians—sometimes known Hamas operatives, but often journalists or physicians or aid workers. In many of these attacks, large numbers of family members, including young children, die under the rubble.

In one of the war’s most notorious incidents, the prominent Palestinian poet and professor Refaat Alareer—so haunted by the daily devastation and the likelihood he and his own family would be targeted that in his final weeks he wrote a poem called “If I Must Die”—had sought refuge at a family home when an Israeli airstrike killed not only him but his brother, sister, and four children.  It’s a similar story for journalists in Gaza, whose death toll—at least 90 Palestinians, according to the conservative tally of the Committee to Protect Journalists—has exceeded any other modern conflict, in just half a year.

The +972 Magazine report, which it confirmed in interviews with six Israeli intelligence officers, said an AI program known as “Lavender” has been used by the Israeli Defense Force to identify targets in Gaza since the start of the war on October 7. The IDF has confirmed that AI is used by its intelligence officers in guiding its tactics in Gaza, but the military and the magazine differed sharply on the issue of human involvement. IDF claims the computer-driven data is only advisory and that humans are still making the key decisions for targeting bombs, but the +972 report said human reviews of the AI targets were often “a rubber stamp” as brief as 20 seconds.  https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/israel-lavender-ai-inhumane

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Categorized Directory: News and Articles about Israel- Palestine Conflict

Palestine and Israel

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Specific Issues Index

from Creating Better World