progressiveissuesblog

Palestinian Media Repression

Updated 2023-11-14

2022-11-26 Repression of Palestinian Media    The May 11, 2022, murder of Palestinian reporter Shireen Abu Akleh, evidently by Israeli soldiers, while she was covering one of their routine raids on a West Bank refugee camp sent ripples through journalistic circles and garnered extensive corporate press coverage. However, when it comes to repression of Palestinian media, Abu Akleh’s killing is just the tip of the iceberg. Palestinian journalists routinely face harassment by Israeli defense forces, and the world’s leading social media platforms have been quick to suspend, block, and restrict users who post pro-Palestinian content, including journalists.

Since 2020, twenty-six Palestinian journalists based in the West Bank have been imprisoned for attempting to cover Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation. According to an April 5, 2022, report by Yuval Abraham in the Intercept, Palestinian journalists who post footage or comment on Israel’s use of force are often placed in administrative detention for months at a time and experience harsh interrogations without ever being charged. After serving months of jail time, detainees are typically forced into entering guilty plea deals offered by Israeli military prosecution in order to be released.    Often, Palestinian journalists’ social media posts are used against them by Israeli authorities.   

During spring 2021, Palestinians and pro-Palestine activists took to social media to condemn the evictions of Palestinian families from the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of Jerusalem. Subsequently, activists who condemned the evictions and journalists who covered them faced account suspensions and restrictions on social media.    “Annually there are tens of thousands of requests that the Israeli cyber unit [sends] to social media companies in an attempt to silence Palestinians. The number of requests is increasing annually. In 2019 Israel made 19,606 requests from the cyber unit to social media companies regarding content takedowns.”  

Repression of Palestinian speech online could soon get much worse. In a January 18, 2022, article for the Jordan Times, Ramzy Baroud revealed that Israel’s minister of justice, Gideon Sa’ar, is pushing legislation known as the “Facebook Law.” The legislation would grant Israeli courts broad powers to remove online content deemed to be “inflammatory” or harmful to the security of the state from social media or “any website at all.”  With the exception of publications focused specifically on Israel or the Middle East, there has been no discussion in the corporate media of Israel’s so-called “Facebook Law.”   https://www.projectcensored.org/14-repression-of-palestinian-media/

2022-04-05 ISRAEL CHARGES PALESTINIAN JOURNALISTS WITH INCITEMENT — FOR DOING THEIR JOBS     In a spate of arrests, Israeli security forces interrogated Palestinian journalists about their work, then hit them with trumped-up charges.  SINCE THE BEGINNING of 2020, Israel has imprisoned at least 26 Palestinian journalists in the West Bank. In most cases, the journalists were placed under administrative detention — a common method used by Israel to hold Palestinians without filing charges — for anywhere between six weeks and one-and-a-half years. Nine of these journalists were indicted, most often for incitement, and on average spent about eight months in detention.

As of March 2022, there were 10 Palestinian journalists in Israeli prisons on charges relating to publishing materials online — either as private individuals or through their professional work — that were deemed “incitement,” according to Saleh al-Masri, who heads the Journalist Support Committee in Palestine. Three of the imprisoned journalists are in administrative detention; three have been indicted; and four are being held and interrogated as part of investigations. (Seven other journalists are being imprisoned for convicted charges of taking part in violent activities that had nothing to do with journalistic work.)    https://theintercept.com/2022/04/05/israel-palestine-journalists-incitement/

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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

Palestine Economy

Updated 2023-11-14

2012-03-12 Palestine’s Golden Oil    Underneath much of the Middle East lies the world’s oil supply, which is pumped year-round to keep the global economy humming along. In one special place in the Middle East—better known as the Holy Land—a different type of oil reigns supreme: olive oil. In this strategic region in the Levant, Palestine has a large amount of land devoted to the olive tree; about 45% of agricultural land in the occupied Palestinian territory (OPT) is planted with twelve million olive trees, the vast majority of which are in the West Bank, and its valuable, healthy fruits take center stage in the political conflict between Palestinians and Israelis every harvesting season.

Land is at the core of this conflict. Israel’s military has confiscated land for illegal Israeli settlements, erected an illegal “Separation Barrier” that separates Palestinian farmers from their plantations, and has not spared Palestinian olive groves: it has uprooted olive trees as a way of punishing the population. The vast majority of Palestinian olive trees are in the West Bank, which has 739,500 dunams (184,875 acres), or 98.6% of the total, whereas, the Gaza Strip had only 11,200 dunams (2,800 acres) of olive trees, which is 1.4%. However, in the Gaza Strip, over 7,300 dunums (1,825 acres) of land along the perimeter fence with Israel, previously cultivated with olive trees, were leveled during Israeli incursions in recent years. An olive seedling can take several decades to fully mature and many of Palestine’s olive trees are hundreds of years old. The horrifying reality is that Israel has added olive trees to their campaign to ethnically cleanse Palestinians and the result is that Palestine’s golden oil is becoming scarcer and much more dangerous to harvest.    https://www.dollarsandsense.org/archives/2012/0312bahour.html

2009-06-09 The Physical and Economic Devastation of Gaza    In late December 2008, Israel launched a massive military attack against the Gaza Strip. Israel’s three-week action caused massive damage to homes, businesses, and infrastructure. It is too soon to know the full cost of the damage. But what we do know is that the attack came at a time when the Palestinians—on the West Bank and all the more so in Gaza—already faced dire economic circumstances.

The 1993 Oslo accords appeared to signal a new prospect for peace and prosperity for Palestinians and Israelis. In fact, however, within a few years after the signing of the accords, social and economic indicators for the Palestinian community began to deteriorate sharply. Since the mid-1990s, Palestinian poverty, malnutrition, and unemployment rates have all risen dramatically while school enrollment rates have fallen—all signs of an economy in crisis.

Why has the population become so impoverished in a period when peace was supposed to be at hand? Much of the economic devastation results from Israeli policies that have increasingly isolated the Palestinians, who until the mid-1990s were highly dependent on Israel for work. Following Oslo, Israel increasingly restricted Palestinians’ movements, not only banning entry of both Palestinians and their goods into Israel (what the World Bank calls “external closure”), but also erecting military checkpoints and road blocks between Palestinian communities (“internal closure”), and implementing curfews that prohibit residents from leaving their homes for hours and sometimes days at a time. The annual number of days of closure has ranged from 100 to over 250 (in 2002). The impact of new restrictions was particularly acute for Gaza where, in the early 1990s, 40% of workers crossed into Israel every day for work. By 2000, that figure had dropped to 15%. (On the West Bank, the rate declined from 30% to 20% over the same period.)

Pressure from business sectors that relied on cheap Palestinian labor at first led to periodic reversals of Israel’s closure policy. Eventually Israel began replacing Palestinian workers by opening its borders to international migration, with workers from as close as Lebanon and as far away as Mexico coming to work in the agricultural fields and service sectors. Although most come on temporary work permits, many stay after their visas expire, with the result that Israel now faces a growing problem of illegal migrants.  https://dollarsandsense.org/archives/2009/0609olmsted.html

2003-11-03 Backs to the Wall  Uncertainty about the future intensified for Mufida Ahmad’s family this year when a mammoth wall ripped through their land in the West Bank village of Jayyus. Ahmad and her husband had bought the quarter acre for $1,400—a hefty but hopeful investment for the family of seven. On it, they cultivated eight olive trees. To pay for the land, and pay off a $4,000 bank loan they had taken to meet the family’s basic needs, Ahmad worked nine hours a day in a sewing factory for a mere $150 a month. But the trees, land, and future for which they had sacrificed have all disappeared under the Israeli Separation Wall.

The Wall—called a “security fence” by the Israeli government and the “Apartheid Wall” by Palestinians—is actually a series of walls, razor wire, electrified fences, trenches, and watchtowers flanked by a 30- to 75-yard “buffer zone” which the Israeli military patrols. The first phase of construction was launched in June 2002 and finished just 13 months later, in July of this year. The completed section stretches for 90 miles in the northwestern West Bank districts of Jenin, Tulkarem, and Qalqiliya. At several points it cuts almost four miles into the West Bank (which spans only 35 miles at its widest section; see the map on p. 29). The Wall has already resulted in Israel’s de facto annexation of fertile Palestinian agricultural land, groundwater wells, and 10 illegal Israeli Jewish-only settlements. Although the first phase of construction was declared complete, demolitions and razing continue around it. The Israeli government has announced three more building phases and it plans to finish the structure by 2005.    https://www.dollarsandsense.org/archives/2003/1103mair.html

2003-05-00 A Palestinian Labor Leader Speaks Out    In the three years since the current intifada, or uprising, began, the already-fragile Palestinian economy has nearly broken down. Under military and economic siege, entire economic sectors have collapsed. Unemployment runs well over 50%, with 411,000 people out of work. Almost half of the population lives on less than $2 a day, and food shortages have struck certain areas. The besieged and directionless Palestinian Authority (PA) appears unable to meet the staggering crisis.

In this context, the Palestine General Federation of Trade Unions (PGFTU) is focused on the literal survival of its members and their families. As one of the largest nongovernmental organizations in Palestine, the PGFTU is responding to the mass deprivation by stepping into a role previously fulfilled by the PA: providing an economic and social safety net for its members. The federation delivers unemployment and health insurance benefits to tens of thousands.   PGFTU also continues its long-term struggle to build a movement for workers’ rights in Palestine, and recently succeeded in pushing the PA to establish a set of working labor laws. With 500,000 public and private worker-members in the West Bank and Gaza strip, PGFTU represents 75% of the Palestinian workforce. That’s a unionization level most unions in the West would envy. But its members have faced conditions that no one would envy.  https://www.dollarsandsense.org/archives/2003/0503aruri.html

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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

Palestine Action

Updated 2023-11-14

2023-11-02 Palestine Action VS Israel w/Lowkey & Huda Ammori      Lowkey catches up with Palestine Action founder Huda Ammori to discuss the revelations in The Guardian of Israeli Embassy intervention in Palestine Action court cases. They also examine Huda’s upcoming court case and the possibility of going to prison for shutting down the Israeli war machine in Britain. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FW34WLYg9QI

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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

Palestinian Children

Updated 2023-11-13

2023-11-10 Palestinian children are not “terrorists”    Israel and its advocates claim “there are no innocents in Gaza” and depict all Palestinians as legitimate targets. For them, to be alive in Gaza is to be implicated.   Israel’s war on Gaza has brutally blurred the distinctions between civilian and military objects, motives, and identities. Over the past four weeks, civilian spaces have made up much of the theater of war. Priority targets for air strikes in Gaza have included apartment blocks, hospitals, an ambulance convoy, communications infrastructure, a university, refugee camps, fishing boats, and schools. Following attacks by Hamas on civilians and military installations in the areas surrounding Gaza, the war has incurred over 10,000 Palestinian casualties in a month.

Indeed, at its most paranoid and inhumane, the conflation of civilians with Hamas casts some of Gaza’s most vulnerable citizens as terrorists. Children and infants are among the groups who most urgently need homes to live in, beds to sleep in, food to eat, water to drink, caregivers, and functioning communities to support their well-being. In the optic of counterinsurgency—an approach to combat that targets community support for clandestine fighters—children’s needs may indeed be seen, perversely, as aligned with the needs of combatants. Yet, in wartime, children and infants are also disparately vulnerable to injury, illness, and death. The international non-governmental organization Save the Children has reported that the child death toll in Gaza had, by October 29, exceeded the number of children killed in combat zones worldwide since 2019. In Belfast last weekend, hundreds of stuffed animals were left at the gate of the US Consulate to symbolize the Palestinian children who have been killed and to emphasize their status as innocents.  https://mondoweiss.net/2023/11/palestinian-children-are-not-terrorists/

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Operation Al-Aqsa Flood – 2023 Gaza Invasion

Updated 202404-03

Operation Al-Aqsa Flood Timeline   https://mondoweiss.net/?s=Operation%20Al-Aqsa%20Flood%20

2023-11-12 ‘Operation Al-Aqsa Flood’ Day 37: Al-Shifa Hospital no longer functioning as Israeli ground troops surround the hospital   Thousands of lives are at risk as Al-Shifa Hospital becomes non-operational, with ICUs and incubators shutting down due to lack of fuel, and medical staff and patients trapped waiting to die. Israeli forces continue to shell hospitals in north Gaza.     https://mondoweiss.net/2023/11/operation-al-aqsa-flood-day-37-al-shifa-hospital-no-longer-functioning-as-israeli-ground-troops-surround-the-hospital/

2023-11-11 ‘Operation Al-Aqsa Flood’ Day 36: Al-Shifa hospital at epicenter of Gaza fighting as fleeing civilians are killed by Israeli strikes    Fighting rages around Gaza’s largest hospital as more Palestinians flee their homes in scenes reminiscent of the Nakba. Lebanon’s role in the conflict hangs in the balance ahead of another speech by Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah.   https://mondoweiss.net/2023/11/operation-al-aqsa-flood-day-36-al-shifa-hospital-at-epicenter-of-gaza-fighting-as-fleeing-civilians-are-killed-by-israeli-strikes/

2023-11-10 ‘Operation Al-Aqsa Flood’ Day 35: Tanks besiege Gaza City hospitals as Israel ramps up attacks on medical centers     https://mondoweiss.net/2023/11/operation-al-aqsa-flood-day-35-tanks-besiege-gaza-city-hospitals-as-israel-ramps-up-attacks-on-medical-centers/

2023-11-09 ‘Operation Al-Aqsa Flood’ Day 34: Children who survive the bombs may die of starvation, disease, and dehydration      https://mondoweiss.net/2023/11/day-34-children-who-survive-the-bombs-may-die-of-starvation-disease-and-dehydration/

2023-10-08 ‘Operation Al-Aqsa Flood’ Day 2: Israel declares war as casualties skyrocket     Ongoing fighting in towns around Gaza.   As of 2 p.m. local time, Palestinian resistance fighters were still engaged with Israeli forces in several Israeli localities bordering Gaza, while the Israeli army announced that it would be evacuating 25 other border towns, and possibly more in the next 24 hours “according to the assessment of the situation.”

Throughout the day, the fighting between Israeli forces and Palestinian commandos has been thickest in Kfar Aza, Re’im, Ofakim, Kissufim, Kibbutz Magen, Erez, Zikim, and several other Israeli colonies, although the map of confrontation continues to shift throughout the day, with some place being taken over by Israeli forces, while others coming under control of Palestinian resistance fighters.

Most importantly, both the resistance factions’ media organs and Israeli military sources are confirming that the Palestinian forces have been able to partially resupply in certain areas, which indicates that the resistance intends to prolong its operation in occupied Palestine.

Hamas military spokesperson Abu Obidah confirmed that Hamas could resupply its fighters inside the occupied territories and managed to infiltrate more fighters.  “The Al-Qassam leadership managed to supply the fighters with weapons, shells, and equipment. The leadership also infiltrated new fighters and supported them with over 100 rockets.” Abu Obidah said. In a recent statement by Abu Obidah, he said that the Hamas air forces joined the battle with over 35 homemade drones. 

The fighters inside Israel are not only Hamas-affiliated fighters, the PIJ also said that dozens of its fighters are joining the battle and fighting the Israelis. 

Whether this may lead to extended control over areas surrounding Gaza, or is part of a moving force meant to fulfill limited tactical objectives before withdrawing, remains to be seen. Media reports have reported increasing Israeli and Palestinian casualties from the ongoing fighting in the settlements, and the Israeli army released the names of 25 soldiers killed during the fighting as of 1 p.m. local time.

Hezbollah launches limited strikes

On Sunday morning, October 8, Hezbollah forces in southern Lebanon fired rockets into northern occupied Palestine at three Israeli targets in the Shebaa Farms region, which is historically Lebanese land that has been occupied by Israel since 1967. The areas targeted by Hezbollah were “radar sites” such as Zebdine and Ruwaisat al-Alam.

The Islamic resistance organization put out a statement following the attack, proclaiming that it was “on the road to the liberation of what remains of occupied Lebanese soil,” and that an armed force in Hezbollah had carried out these attacks on the Israeli sites with “a large amount of artillery fire and guided missiles.”

2023-10-07 ‘Operation Al Aqsa Flood’ was an act of decolonization  Much of the commentary around the “Al Aqsa Flood” operation, where Palestinian resistance fighters from Gaza broke free from the concentration camp we know as the Gaza Strip, dismisses or outright ignores two things that every Palestinian knows to be true:

1) There is no form of violence that Israel can hope to punish us with for the first time now. Massacres, home demolitions, life imprisonment sentences where prisoners are tortured and sexually assaulted, blockade and siege, execution in the streets. Over and over again, we watch funeral after funeral, and we know that in horror we will see many more.

2) We do not intend to remain a population of oppressed refugees and prisoners and denied access to the land that is our way of life forever.

 The resistance fighters came from the Gaza Strip, where the vast majority of the population are refugees ethnically cleansed from their villages, many of which have been destroyed and had settlements built over their remains, like Sderot. They have since been shoved into camps, where rather than having bread and dignity, they are denied access to food, water, and medicine. They have been living at the whim of the settlers who built their lives on the remains of their villages and lands.

From the moment those fighters flew in on paramotors, disrupting the parallel reality that was this music festival, they accomplished something profound (one must wonder what it felt like for these fighters to see a party just outside where they have been trapped under a suffocating blockade). They reimagined their relation to the land not as something in the distance but as a tangible place for them to set foot on. They entered the rest of their homeland not through a checkpoint hoping to be granted a permit, but as a force to be reckoned with. They were autonomous, enacting their will by force against this population of heavily militarized settlers, the very vast majority of whom have “served” or are currently in the Israeli military where careers are made out of Palestinian suffering and death. That moment when a (Palestinian! For Once!) bulldozer took down the fence was decolonization in practice: that fence, and the snipers behind it defending the settler-colonial order, were overcome.

The Palestinian resistance did nothing less than lay the groundwork for the end of violent Israeli rule over our lands. They did so by employing a violence to end the root cause of the oppression of Palestinians, not do another spin of the so-called “cycle.” As Paulo Freire put it, violence had already begun “with the establishment of a relationship of oppression…never in history has violence been initiated by the oppressed. How could they be the initiatiors, if they themselves are the result of violence?”     https://mondoweiss.net/2023/10/operation-al-aqsa-flood-was-an-act-of-decolonization/

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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

Obama, Barak

Updated 2023-11-13

2023-11-02 Obama Sides With The Palestinians!    With the ongoing theft of land from Palestinians in the West Bank and resulting Israeli settlements, the prospects for a two-state solution are all but dead. Yet American politicians continue to pay lip service to the idea of negotiating a workable resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian crisis that will result in a mutually agreeable agreement offering independence and security to both.    Guest host Craig Jardula and Americans’ Comedian Kurt Metzger talk to  independent journalist and filmmaker Dan Cohen about why politicians promoting the two-state solution are lying to themselves and to us https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K-GXU3dni5M&t=2s

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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

Misinformation

2023-10-27 How misinformation could shape the Israel-Hamas war  I wanted to interview Nicholas Grossman regarding the role of misinformation in the war between Israel and Hamas. In particular, I hoped to ask the professor of international relations at the University of Illinois, and senior editor of Arc Digital, about misinformation that arose from American reporting on an explosion at a hospital in Gaza.  [MEK Note:  The author himself jumps to the conclusion that first on ground reports were untrue, because U.S. Government says so when a full investigation hasn’t happened and corporate media were already caught using fake video.  Misinformation is whatever information one wishes to characterize,  when it does not want further investigation!]    https://www.alternet.org/alternet-exclusives/israel-hamas/

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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

Merchants of Death War Crimes Tribunal

Updated 2013-11-13

Merchants of Death War Crimes Tribunal   The first session of the Merchants of Death War Crimes Tribunal was held this evening 2023-11-12. The focus was Palestine. Here is the recording:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OUozh3vLFQQ

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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

Journalists

Updated 2023-11-13

2023-11-10    750+ Journalists to Colleagues: ‘Tell the Full Truth’ About Israeli Atrocities in Gaza     Hundreds of international media professionals have signed on to an open letter published Thursday demanding an end to Israel’s killing of journalists in Gaza and urging Western newsrooms to call Israeli crimes—including “apartheid, ethnic cleansing, and genocide”—by their names.    “The urgency of this moment cannot be overstated,” the journalists wrote. “It is imperative that we change course.”

Citing the Committee to Protect Journalists—which says at least 34 Palestinian media professionals have been killed during Israel’s monthlong assault on Gaza—the letter states that “as reporters, editors, photographers, producers, and other workers in newsrooms around the world, we are appalled at the slaughter of our colleagues and their families by the Israeli military and government.”   

“An investigation from Reporters Without Borders also shows deliberate targeting of journalists during two October 13 Israeli strikes in south Lebanon, which killed Reuters videographer Issam Abdallah and injured six other journalists,” the signers said.   https://www.commondreams.org/news/journalist-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

Jewish Opinions on Oppression

Updated 2023-11-13

2023-11-11 As Jews we know, this is not a war. It’s a genocide   Understanding our own history as Jews leads us to speak out against Israel’s genocide of the Palestinian people. We stand for the liberation of the Palestinian people because we have known what it is to not be free.    https://mondoweiss.net/2023/11/as-jews-we-know-this-is-not-a-war-its-a-genocide/

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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