The Arab League warned that the separation wall built by Israel will devour fertile farmland in the West Bank province of Qalqiliya, within the framework of a systematic plan to take control of Palestine’s most fertile and strategically important lands.

Last night, the student government at the University of California at Davis voted in favor of a resolution to divest from corporations profiting from Israel’s occupation.

In a landslide vote — eight voting yes, two against and two abstaining — the student government at UC Davis recommended that the University of California system’s governing body divest from Caterpillar, G4S, Veolia Environment and Raytheon.

The divestment victory comes just months after the UC Davis administration appeared to be receptive to efforts by the Anti-Defamation League — a leading Israel lobby group — to treat boycott, divestment and sanctions efforts as “hostile events” that the university should deem security threats.

Publication of tenders for 450 new units over the Green Line will further isolate Israel, says State Department; U.K. also condemns the announcement.

No doubt another reason why Israelis fear Syriza so much. Tsipras has the nerve to wear the fearsome Palestinian scarf that strikes terror in the hearts of every Israeli. Can you imagine the uproar in Israel had he actually done something to help Palestinians?

The Israeli authorities on Friday published tenders to build 450 new illegal settler homes in the occupied West Bank, the head of an NGO that monitors settlement activity said, as Zionist settlers attempted to kidnap an 18-month-old Palestinian toddler in occupied East Jerusalem.

On Thursday November 6, a 34 year-old man with no affiliation to the University of Toronto furiously entered the Scarborough Campus Students’ Union office after hours. He stole a poster that read WARNING: THIS UNIVERSITY PROFITS OFF ISRAELI APARTHEID AND OCCUPATION. All attempts to calm him down failed. After stealing the poster he drove off, recording the incident with his phone. Campus police filed a report and said to notify them if the man returns. After a couple of weeks we put up another sign. The man came back. He forced his way into the student union. We tried to calm him down and initiate dialogue. The man replied with, “I’ll rip your fucking throat out” and “I have twelve guys on standby ready”—implying that he or other people will be back. He shouted that he use to be a part of the “israeli” military and regularly killed “terrorists”.

Surprise– ‘NYT’ publishes straightforward report on Israeli human rights violations in Gaza

A new traveling photography exhibition highlights the struggle of Palestinian Bedouin communities in the Naqab (Negev) desert, located in the south of present-day Israel.

The photos — taken by youth in Bedouin villages — document the poor conditions in these communities. Unrecognized or underserved by the state, the villages lack basic infrastructure such as water, electricity, health care, schools and other services.

August 21, 2006
Israel is on a rampage. It has been raining death and destruction in Gaza for weeks. It pounded Lebanon into rubble. It, with the help of the US , resisted calls for an immediate cease fire. After the UN passed a resolution calling for a cessation of hostilities, it went ahead and carried out a raid in Lebanon , in flagrant and clear violation of the cease-fire resolution, and Israel ’s Prime Minister has said such raids may well continue.

In the West Bank it carried out a raid in broad daylight as late as Sunday August 20 and grabbed from his Ramallah home Mahmoud-al-Ramahi, a senior Hamas member and secretary general of the Palestinian parliament. Just a day before Israeil soldiers swooped in on Deputy Prime Minister Nasser Shaer and seized him from his home, also n Ramallah. Israel presently holds five Palestinian Cabinet ministers and more than two dozen lawmakers. Almost all of Hamas West Bank leadership is now in Israeli custody.

An Israeli human rights group has accused the IDF of war crimes during last year’s Gaza invasion by launching airstrikes that intentionally targeted residential areas, killing women and children, while claiming that Hamas was hiding behind civilians.

As prosecutors at the International Criminal Court in The Hague are conducting a preliminary inquiry into possible war crimes committed by Israel in the Palestinian territories, the 49-page report by B'Tselem human rights group claims the allegations are true.

Click on Google today and you will be directed to stories and exhibitions about the liberation of Auschwitz 70 years ago. This week the entire Web is full of the same …. including one from the greatest profiteer of the holocaust himself.

But

What about the horrors of today? Where are those stories??

The United Nations Relief & Works Agency (UNRWA) has been forced to suspend its cash assistance programme in Gaza to tens of thousands of people for repairs to damaged and destroyed homes and for rental subsidies to the homeless.

A young Israeli soldier, fresh from the front, bluntly recounts the orders from above. “They never said, ‘Leave no one alive,’ but they said, ‘Show no mercy,’ ” he explains. “The brigade commander said to kill as many as possible.”

Another recalls encountering Arabs on rooftops. “They’re civilians — should I kill them or not?” he asks himself. “I didn’t even think about it. Just kill! Kill everyone you see.” And a third makes it personal: “All of us — Avinoam, Zvika, Yitzhaki — we’re not murderers. In the war, we all became murderers.”

Foreign Minister Avigdor Liberman called on party activists Sunday to buy “thousands” of copies of the controversial “Mohammed edition” of the Charlie Hebdo satirical magazine, which they will then distribute to Israelis on a mass basis.

The United Nations has condemned Israel for illegally demolishing houses of Palestinians in East Jerusalem, leaving 77 people, over half of whom are children, homeless in three days.

With the International Criminal Court’s (ICC) acceptance of Palestine as a member, and its agreement to investigate possible Israeli war crimes during last summer’s brutal bombardment of the Gaza Strip, Israeli Prime Murderer Benjamin Netanyahu seems to be having fits of rage. His puppet, the United States government, has also denounced the Court’s decisions, and Mr. Netanyahu has made the following bizarre statements:

* “It’s absurd for the ICC to go after Israel, which upholds the highest standards of international law. Our actions are subject to the constant and careful review of Israel’s world-renowned and utterly independent legal system.”

* “But this decision is even more preposterous given that Israel is legitimately defending itself against Palestinian terrorists who routinely commit multiple war crimes. They deliberately fire thousands of rockets at our civilians, while hiding behind Palestinian civilians whom they use a human shield.”

On Wednesday in Tel Aviv, a 23-year-old Palestinian man stabbed and injured as many as 12 Israelis who were riding a public bus during morning rush hour. No deaths were reported, although three people were hospitalized with serious injuries.

U.S. mainstream media coverage of this attack painted a picture of Israeli citizens living in fear of deranged Palestinian terrorists. The media rarely mentioned that Israeli forces have maintained a 48-year military occupation that profoundly impacts and virtually imprisons 4 million Palestinian men, women, and children in the West Bank and Gaza. The media also omitted significant information on Palestinians killed and injured by Israel during the period reported on.

Two weeks after his release from prison, ISM activists had the opportunity to sit with Aiman Awwad and his friend, Samer Zaqah, in their hometown of Awarta. Aiman was arrested in June 2004, at the age of 20, and released in January 2015, jailed for a total of ten and a half years in multiple Israeli military prisons. He was previously arrested at the age of 14, and shot in the leg by an Israeli solider.

A UN agency tasked with providing aid for Palestinians will suspend its activities in the war-torn Gaza Strip due to a lack of funds.

In a significant political and economic development, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas met Jan. 23 with Russian President Vladimir Putin. The meeting came as a prerequisite to officially sign an investment agreement aiming to develop the Gaza offshore gas field in the Mediterranean Sea. It is only logical to assume that this step will raise the ire of Israel. The latter does not appreciate the role Russia plays in the region, especially since Israel has never come to an agreement with Russia.

For the past two decades Israeli-born, UK-based saxophonist, author and political provocateur Gilad Atzmon has matched his incendiary playing and controversial opinions with a relentlessly questioning attitude to the establishment and his own identity. With 15 albums to his name – backed by his rip-roaring Orient House Ensemble – Atzmon’s latest, The Whistle Blower, is perhaps his most compelling to date, his garrulous playing both mesmerising and melancholic by turns. Stuart Nicholson discovers the outspoken polymath is still searching for answers in today’s polemical maelstrom through passion, humour and politics

Sami Ziadna, who died as a result of excessive tear gas inhalation on Sunday night, was the fiftieth Palestinian citizen of Israel to be killed by Israeli police since October 2000.

Then, as protests spread throughout Palestinian communities in present-day Israel, thirteen unarmed demonstrators were shot and killed by police officers in the northern Galilee region. Since then, Palestinian citizens of Israel have endured ongoing police brutality.

An estimated 1.7 million Palestinians carry Israeli citizenship but dozens of discriminatory laws stifle their political expression and limit their access to state resources, including land and education.

Israeli forces demolished a Palestinian house in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Jabal al-Mukabir on Wednesday, locals told Ma’an.

Israeli forces raided the neighborhood and surrounded a house belonging to Ulayyan Jalal Rabaya before a bulldozer destroyed the property.

Rabaya said he had begun renovation work on the interior of the house some months ago to live there with his fiance, who he is due to marry.

Jerusalem municipality workers posted a demolition order on the property last Monday saying that it lacked a building permit.

Two other house belonging to the Rabaya family are also slated for demolition, with a court decision expected Friday.

Israeli forces launched a major detention campaign in the northern West Bank refugee camps of Balata and Askar in Nablus district overnight, Palestinian security sources said.

More than 15 young men were seized after forces ransacked many houses.

Palestinian security sources told Ma’an that more than 20 Israeli military jeeps stormed Balata and Askar refugee camps near Nablus at midnight and broke into dozens of houses.

Locals said most of the houses belonged to Fatah supporters. Among those whose houses which were ransacked are Fayiz Arafat, Nasser al-Khatib Abu Aziz, Ahmad Naji Abu Hamada, Muhammad Abu Dari, Abu Mahyub abu Leil, Muhammad Abu Zaabal, Hatim abu Riziq, Talal abu Thira, Abu Hazim Kharma, Atallah Hashash, Bashir Hashash, Hasan Sharaya, Abu Nasim Arayshi and Mahir Ayyad.

Israel’s large Arab minority closed shops and schools from the northern Galilee to the southern Negev desert Tuesday as part of a daylong strike to protest against the death of two Arab men in incidents involving Israeli police.

The Security Council determines that the policy and practices of Israel in establishing settlements in the Palestinian and other Arab territories occupied since 1967 have no legal validity and constitute a serious obstruction to achieving a comprehensive, just and lasting peace in the Middle East. – United Nations Security Council Resolution 446, 1979.

For decades, Israel has never faced any international oversight, or recognized any international laws or UN resolutions regarding its illegal and violent occupation in Palestine.

Writer Ali Albunimah explains, “When your land has been occupied by a foreign army as long as your children have been alive, and this occupying army regularly brutalises and humiliates the friends and relatives of these children, stopping kids from confronting the invaders is naturally going to be very difficult. Convincing the Israeli adults in control of this weaponry in civilian areas that they should not be using it to kill children who are merely stone throwers should not be difficult. The statistics sadly tell a different story, of a deep-rooted Israeli contempt for the lives of Palestinian children that should inspire Western outrage.”

Israel said on Sunday it had cracked the first Islamic State cell on its soil, made up of seven Arab citizens who would be prosecuted on charges of planning attacks in the Jewish state and communicating with the insurgent group in Syria, Reuters reported.

"The defendants, including a lawyer who was representing himself in court, denied the charges of belonging to an illegal group, aiding terrorism and contacting foreign agents," a Justice Ministry spokesman said after a gag order on the case was eased.

Though members of Israel's 20 per cent Arab minority rarely turn to armed violence, many chafe at state authority and security officials worry about Islamist doctrines taking root.

Notice how the post-attack narrative has morphed from protecting freedom of the press and France from jihadists to protecting French Jews from Muslims and ridding Europe of anti-Semitism, which, according to Israeli PM Netenyahu, can only be accomplished by eliminating funding of the International Criminal Court so they can't try Israel for the massive number of war crimes it committed against Gaza and by letting European Jews and ONLY Jews, carry firearms?

Yes, that would work out splendidly, wouldn't it?

Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird reaffirmed Canada's opposition Monday to a Palestinian attempt to pursue war crimes charges against Israel at the International Criminal Court.

Speaking in Jerusalem, Baird said the Palestinians "made a huge mistake" by going to the ICC, an United Nations institution that Canada played a lead role in creating in the 1990s.

Israeli politicians are calling on the 122 member states of the International Criminal Court to cut its funding in response to the beginning of its inquiry into possible war crimes in Gaza last year.

The ICC announced Friday it would investigate "in full independence and impartiality" crimes that may have occurred in the conflict between Israel and Hamas militants in Gaza in July-August 2014.

An attorney and international advocacy officer for Defence for Children International-Palestine (DCI-Palestine) says that 2014 was “devastating” for Palestinian children.

Whether they were killed, injured or left homeless and traumatized in the Gaza Strip during Israel’s summer attack, or whether they faced “increasing levels of violence [by Israeli forces] … at demonstrations [or] as part of military operations throughout the West Bank” including occupied East Jerusalem — especially during frequent arrest raids — Palestinian children were regular targets of Israel’s systematic violence throughout 2014, says Brad Parker of DCI-Palestine.

As the incitement to violence by Israeli leaders ramped up, so did racist attacks by Israeli citizens.

Dozens of Palestinian protesters in Ramallah have hurled eggs and shoes at the convoy of Canadian Foreign Minister John Baird.

Baird travelled to the West Bank city today to meet with Palestinian Foreign Minister Riad Malki.

The protesters held signs reading: "Baird you are not welcome in Palestine."

Israel has expressed outrage over a move by the International Criminal Court (ICC) to launch a preliminary investigation into Tel Aviv’s war crimes against Palestinians in the besieged Gaza Strip.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a statement that he rejected the "scandalous" ICC decision, claiming the court has no jurisdiction over Palestine as it is not a state.

Tens of thousands of Palestinians were killed or injured in Israel's war on Gaza last summer.

The Israeli military court in Salem, north of Jenin, has sentenced Palestinian cartoonist Mohammed Sabana to five months imprisonment on the charge of contacting “hostile parties”.

Family members told the PIC reporter on Saturday that the court passed the sentence on Friday and charged Sabana with making such contacts during his visit to Jordan.

They said that the charges were unfounded, adding that the sentence was illegal and proved the summary trials conducted against Palestinian citizens.

Al Jazeera has learned that the ICC chief prosecutor may be close to opening investigation into last summer's Gaza war.

Palestine representative to the United Nations Ambassador Riyad Mansour said the UN Security Council did not assume its responsibilities towards Palestine or implement its resolutions regarding the Israeli occupation.

"We should focus on applying the law and punishing those who violate it and remove any immunity from the occupation," Mansour said during a Security Council emergency meeting on the Middle East.

He stressed that achieving just and comprehensive peace requires the application of the United Nations resolutions about Israel.

Just two days before Palestinians commemorate the 65th anniversary of the Nakba, the names of two Palestinian cameramen targeted and killed by Israeli airstrikes in Gaza last November were dropped from a dedication ceremony held to honor “reporters, photographers and broadcasters who have died reporting the news” over the past year. The move followed an Israel lobby pressure campaign led by anti-Palestinian organizations such as the Anti-Defamation League, the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies and the American Jewish Committee, efforts that were openly supported by the Israeli government.

Political gadfly Jimmy Carter said on Wednesday that the International Criminal Court (ICC) should probe Israel for possible war crimes committed during Operation Protective Edge in Gaza following the Hamas rocket attacks. During an appearance on a television comedy show, the former American president --who in the past accused Israel of practicing apartheid and has showed his support for Islamist terrorist groups -- also blamed the Paris attacks on the Muslims' anger over the harsh treatment of the Palestinian people by the Israeli occupiers.

On January 2, Palestinian activists discovered the fields of Khirbet Twael where covered with different types of explosive devices. The discovery was made as they were implementing a land reclamation activity in the lands owned by many families from the villages of Aqraba and Khirbet Twael. They were planting olive trees to defend the lands from confiscation and as part of the annual activity to mark the foundation of the Jewish National Fund promoted by the StopJNF campaign.

In the document, written on 30 June 1976 when the crisis was still unresolved, DH Colvin of the Paris Embassy wrote that according to his source, "the hijack was the work of the PFLP, with help from the Israeli Secret Service, the Shin Bet.

"The operation was designed to torpedo the PLO's standing in France and to prevent what they see as a growing rapprochement between the PLO and the Americans."

Menachem Begin planned the destruction of the King David Hotel and the massacre of Deir Yassin. Ex prime minister, Shamir, was originally a member of the Jewish "terrorist" gang called Irgun, which was headed by none other than Menachem Begin. Shamir later moved over to the even more radical "Stern Gang," which committed many vicious atrocities.

Shamir himself has defended the various assassinations committed by the Irgun and Stern gangs on the grounds that "it was the only way we could operate, because we were so small. So it was more efficient and more moral to go for selected targets." The selected moral targets in those early days of the founding of the state of Israel included bombing of the King David Hotel and the massacre of Deir Yassin.

Israel’s occupation army has carried out 72 attacks on journalists in the Gaza Strip during its latest war on the territory which started on 7 July, Palestinian information ministry in Gaza said on Friday.

The number of violations rose after the death of journalists Sameh al-Arian and Mohamed Daher on Thursday. They died from injuries sustained during an Israeli attack.

A core tenet of journalism is answering the question “why.” It’s the media’s duty to explain “why” an event happened so that readers will actually understand what they’re reading. Leave out the “why” and then assumptions and stereotypes fill in the blank, always readily supplied by politicians whose ridiculous answers are left unquestioned by the corporate media.

Because the real “why” was unexplained in the Charlie Hebdo massacre, an obviously false culprit was created, leading to a moronic national discussion in the U.S. media about whether Islam was “inherently” violent.

For the media to even pose this question either betrays a blinding ignorance about the Middle East and Islam, or a conscious willingness to manipulate public sentiment by only interviewing so-called experts who believe such nonsense.

The United States blocked the latest UN resolution to achieve peace between Israel and Palestine for the most disingenuous of reasons

A coalition of more than 40 New York City community groups held a press conference outside City Hall on Monday calling for the City Council to cancel a planned delegation to Israel. A diverse group of speakers addressed the city’s progressive politicians, asking how they could reconcile their opposition to racism and state violence at home with support for Israel’s policies against the Palestinians.

BBC reporter Tim Willcox has apologised after he told the daughter of a Holocaust survivor during a broadcast from the Paris rally yesterday: 'Palestinians suffer hugely at Jewish hands as well'.

Tradition has it that Jerusalem’s Dome of the Rock and Al-Aqsa Mosque were built upon the ruins of King Solomon’s Temple, destroyed by the Romans in 70AD.

But what if the ruins aren’t there?

That, in fact, is the conclusion drawn by Dr. George Buchanan, Professor Emeritus of New Testament Studies at Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington, D.C.

Dr. Buchanan posits that the original site of King Solomon’s Temple is just south of the Dome of the Rock and Al-Aska Mosque in an area where today Palestinian homes are being bulldozed to make way for a park over what is now considered by many archaeologists the old City of David.

In 2009, The Jerusalem Post published an exposé of the growing tendency of Orthodox Jews in Jerusalem to spit on their Christian neighbours. (‘Mouths Filled with Hatred’, By Larry Derfner The JPost, Nov. 26, 2009). Israel Shahak also commented on Jewish hatred of Christianity and its symbols, suggesting, “Dishonouring Christian religious symbols is an old religious duty in Judaism.” According to Shahak, “spitting on the cross, and especially on the Crucifix, and spitting when a Jew passes a church, have been obligatory from around AD 200 for pious Jews.”

Interestingly, Jewish spitting has had an impact on the urban landscape of Europe. The following can be read in a ‘Travel Guide for Jewish Europe.’

The Israeli army is conducting military drills in the occupied West Bank as part of preparations to deal with possible deterioration in security conditions in the Palestinian territories, Press TV reports.

The level of military exercises has been unprecedented over the past 10 years, the Israeli newspaper Ma'ariv quoted unidentified Israeli military sources as saying.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke several days ago on the phone with French President Francois Hollande and asked him to halt the French initiative being promoted by the country's foreign minister Laurent Fabius.

Originally from the village of Qabatiya near Jenin, 34-year-old Saba’aneh started drawing all the pictures on exhibition while he was in jail, completing them later.

He spent five months in prison after being arrested by Israeli occupation forces this past February. After two months of internment without charge, Israel charged him with drawing cartoons in a book they alleged had some association with Hamas.

Three days ago Dan Cohen tweeted this photo from Gaza with seven words, “Selfie with the greatest threat to Israel,” and the tweet went viral, retweeted 16,000 times. I spoke to Cohen yesterday by Skype in Gaza to ask him about the photo and its resonance.

We should be swift to condemn atrocity, whether from East or West (and West has been guilty of plenty) but slow to jump to conclusions as to perpetrators or motive of violent outrages such as this one today, in the offices of Charlie Hebdo, the French weekly satirical magazine. Recent history and events have taught us that, at least.

The reality is that these barbarous acts are embedded in, and cannot be extricated from, the whole Middle East mess, for which we cannot escape partial responsibility. The bottom line is that the role of France and other Western countries in Syria and elsewhere has probably more to do with today’s outrage than a few cartoons and the issue of free speech to which the public’s attention has been directed.

An armed man exchanging in gunfire with police has taken five hostages and killed two of them at a kosher deli in the Porte de Vincennes area of Paris, various media reported Friday morning.

Some fear the existence of a long-term plan to overturn Muslim sovereignty and build a third Jewish temple, a topic that is increasingly prominent in the curricula of Jewish religious schools which come under the authority of Israel's education ministry.

The US State Department is demanding that the International Criminal Court (ICC) reject Palestinian membership on the grounds that “Palestine is not a state” and that the application is therefore unacceptable.

The comments echo those from Israeli Premier Benjamin Netanyahu, though as neither Israel nor the US is a ratified member of the ICC, neither necessarily has much pull, and the UN has already confirmed Palestine’s membership will be active effective April 1.

Just one month ago, France set off a stampede when its lower house voted to recognize Palestine. Now Palestine is in the International Criminal Court, poised to take down Israel for genocide.

Suddenly "Islamic terror strikes France." Is Paris being punished for its pro-Palestine vote?

An Egyptian committee has finished surveying the homes of individuals living between 500-1,000 meters of the Gaza border in preparation for the extension of a buffer zone on the border to a width of 1,000 meters, Egyptian military sources said Friday.

The move comes after the destruction of hundreds of homes inside the 500-meter area previously, as part of a wider effort to ensure that the joint Israeli-Egyptian blockade of the Gaza Strip be fully carried out.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has confirmed that the Palestinians will officially become a member of the International Criminal Court on April 1, the U.N. press office said on Wednesday.

The US has asked Turkey to put pressure on the Palestinian Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) in order to "reduce tensions and prevent violence" in the occupied territories. A spokesman for the US state department said that the matter has been raised at senior levels with the government in Ankara.

The legal advisor to the Israeli government declared yesterday his decision to file an indictment against the Member of the Knesset for the National Democratic Alliance Hanin Zoabi on charges of inciting violence and insulting a civil servant.

Dennis Ross has done it again. In “Stop Giving Palestinians a Pass” (NY Times, January 4, 2015), he blames the Palestinians for the lack of peace with Israel. Citing “three serious negotiations”– the 2000 Clinton parameters, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s 2008 proposal, and the recently ended negotiations led by Secretary of State John Kerry – Ross implies that Palestinian refusal to compromise spoiled each of these opportunities.

Israel is concentrating all of its efforts on dividing the people of Jerusalem into individual factions and they have a plan to target each of these factions in an individual way. Israel’s plan of attack is being implemented slowly so that it can permanently phase out the Palestinian presence in the city, little by little and gradually in a frantic war over the city.

In the occupied Gaza Strip, which the United Nations warns will be potentially unlivable by 2020, the passing year closed as it had begun: under a comprehensive siege imposed by Israel in 2007 and enforced by Egypt’s dictatorship.

An Israeli airstrike on Gaza on 20 December — the first since the 51-day massive assault this summer — raised fears of renewed military conflict.

Israel has violated on a daily basis the 26 August ceasefire which ended nearly two months of intensive bombing and shelling, during which 2,257 Palestinians in Gaza were killed, including 539 children, according to the UN monitoring group OCHA.

How important is the decision by Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian Authority’s president, to sign the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC)?

The prominent human rights advocate Shawan Jabarin suggests that the decision is like a moving snowball that “can’t be stopped.” Although Israel has been granted impunity by Western governments for decades, there is now a real possibility of bringing Israeli war criminals to justice.

Egypt has started work on the second stage of a buffer zone between the Sinai Peninsula and the Gaza Strip for the purpose of ending cross-border weapons smuggling and terrorism.

Late last year, Egypt announced plans to double its security buffer zone along the Gaza border to 1 kilometer (about six-tenths of a mile), which would mean the relocation of some 1,200 homes on the Egyptian side of the border.

Palestine will join the International Criminal Court on April 1, announced UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on Tuesday. The Palestinians will be able to sue Israel for war crimes, a move the Israeli administration has consistently opposed for decades.

The UN treaty website says that due to the court's procedures “the statute will enter into force for the State of Palestine on April 1, 2015.”

Just days after the Israeli government announced it is seizing some $100 million in tax money from the Palestinian Authority to “punish” them for trying to join the International Criminal Courts (ICC), the Israeli state-run electric company has announced it will cut off electricity supplies to the Palestinians for non-payment.

This is a post about both criticizing and attacking zionism from within … specifically about Avraham Burg, ANOTHER ZIONIST WAKES UP TO REALITY. Zion sees this man as a traitor, we see him as a mentch and welcome him into the ranks of reality.

In an OP-ED from today’s Ynet, the following report follows. Instead of looking in the mirror and seeing the horrors of zionism, they try to find fault with Burg’s decision about leaving their ranks.

Burg’s claims against Israel are so unfounded that it’s hard to believe they are coming out of the mouth of a person who was the Labor Party’s whiz kid.

Israeli legal group Shurat HaDin, the Israel Law Center, filed lawsuits on Monday at the International Criminal Court (ICC) against three Palestinian Authority leaders for alleged war crimes, terrorism and human rights offenses, following PA President Mahmoud Abbas’s move last week to join the court and seek to prosecute Israel.

When the Palestinians sought statehood at the United Nations in 2011, it was widely dismissed as a symbolic gambit to skirt negotiations with Israel and Washington’s influence over the long-running conflict. But the Palestinians have begun to translate a series of such symbolic steps, culminating in last week’s move to join the International Criminal Court, into a strategy that has begun to create pressure on Israel.

The Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, along with Defense Minister Moshe Ya'alon, approved on Sunday the expansion of an Israeli colony located on stolen Palestinian land near Ramallah.

Israeli President Reuven Rivlin said on Monday he opposed a freeze in the transfer of taxes to the Palestinians in response to their application to join the International Criminal Court.

"Freezing taxes can be useful neither for Israel nor for the Palestinians," Rivlin told ambassadors accredited to Israel in a speech.

“I need to say again, as a Jew and refugee from Nazi Germany I am ashamed of Israel, a country I once hoped to love. Zionism has succeeded to activate the rise of anti-Semitism, a result in my view of a grisly, brutal agenda of ethnic cleansing, , apartheid and human rights crimes against Palestinians.”

The Palestinian Authority's formal application to join the International Criminal Court has been met with a flood of retaliation and threats from Israel and the United States, illustrating, critics say, the unjust policies of these powerful countries.

The PA formally submitted the application to the global court on Friday, signaling the intention to "seek justice for all the victims that have been killed by Israel," including during the latest 50-day military assault on Gaza, which killed at least 2,194 Palestinians, over 75 percent of them civilians and more than 500 of them children.

Just one day after the application was submitted, Israel announced that it will freeze approximately $127.6 million in Palestinian Authority tax revenue in retaliation. Excluding international aid, this revenue comprises two-thirds of the PA's annual budget, according to Al Jazeera America.

President Reuven Rivlin on Monday slammed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over his decision to freeze the transfer of tax revenues to the Palestinian Authority, telling a closed meeting of more than 30 Israeli envoys to Europe that the move was damaging to Israel.

Israeli Premier Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon have announced they will divert some $18 million from the nation’s military budget , which includes money provided as direct military aid from the United States and others, to settlement expansion in the occupied West Bank.

Netanyahu had promised to provide the money to construction 300 more homes in Beit El settlement after the 2012 court decision to demolish 5 apartment buildings built illegally on privately owned Palestinian land.

A day after seizing some $100 million worth of tax funds from the Palestinian Authority, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed to take more hostile action against the Palestinians to punish them for seeking membership in the International Criminal Court (ICC).

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday threatened a strong response to the Palestinian application to join the International Criminal Court, saying the move represented the opening salvo of a further confrontation with Israel.

Recently passed American legislation states that if the Palestinians initiate any action against Israel at the ICC, the State Department would have to stop American aid to the PA, which comes to some $400 million annually.

Palestinian activists dressed in Santa Claus outfits on Thursday sprayed graffiti demanding an end to the Israeli occupation and freedom for Palestinians on the Israeli separation wall in the southern West Bank town of Bethlehem.

They not only invaded our home, took over our space, and evicted us—they even arrested me and took me to the Maskubya—the police station. I was put in room number four, alone, for a long time. Then, a big and tall man, a police officer, entered the interrogation room. I was alone, and started shivering from fear as he closed the door, started moving things around in the room and examining me from head to toe. I was terrorized, and my heart was beating so fast. His eyes penetrated my body, as he was opening the drawers looking for something. Then, he left the room and came back five minutes later holding a box. He pulled out a pair of blue plastic gloves, and put one on each of his hands, while looking at me and saying “…Come here…” I must tell you that I was terrorized when they invaded the house and evicted us. I was extremely anxious when they arrested my son.

A group of British activists has filed a lawsuit against Israeli troops over a 2010 attack on a Gaza-bound aid flotilla that left 10 Turkish activists dead.

Lawyers of the activists have asked Scotland Yard to open a probe into the incident to find whether Israeli special forces committed war crimes.

Israel is withholding $127 million (€106 million) in tax revenue it collects for the Palestinian Authority in response to its move last week to join the International Criminal Court, further escalating tensions with a step that could have repercussions for both sides.

Saeb Erekat, the chief Palestinian negotiator, said that the Israeli move could lead to the disintegration of the 20-year-old authority because it would be unable to pay government workers or provide public services. He promised to retaliate by expediting the petitions to join the court and other international agencies and said Israel “will be held accountable for everything.”

Israel has decided to freeze the transfer of half a billion shekels (more than $127 million) in tax revenues collected on behalf of the Palestinians following the Palestinians' recent attempts to join the International Criminal Court, an Israeli official has told Haaretz.

Three Palestinian shepherds were injured on Saturday after Israeli forces and private security guards at a Jewish settlement opened fire on a crowd near Nablus.

Ghassan Daghlas, a Palestinian official who monitors settlement activity in the northern West Bank, told Ma'an that several Israeli settlers attacked a group of shepherds in the area of Khirbet Yanun near the village of Aqraba and opened live fire at them after the group entered the area.

Israeli soldiers later entered the area and opened fire as well, hitting three men.

Al Aqsa Association for Waqf and Heritage has reported that Israelis carried out some 86 assaults and violations of Islamic and Christian Palestinian holy sites in the occupied West Bank and Jerusalem in 2014.

Israeli forces fired down the road leading from the checkpoint to the schools, filling the street adjacent to the schools with a choking cloud of gas and preventing Palestinians walking through the checkpoint from continuing down the street. As it is exam season in al-Khalil’s schools, children were attempting to reach school between seven and eight am and leaving again between nine thirty and eleven. Israeli military forces kept up a sporadic barrage of fire from the time some children were still walking to school until after school finished, forcing anyone traveling in either direction to brave whistling tear gas canisters and the dizzying smoke which still lingered even after the shooting had halted.

Jewish settlers have uprooted more than 5,000 olive tree saplings in agricultural lands east of the town of Turmusayya in the central West Bank north of Ramallah, locals said Thursday.

One of the owners of the lands targeted, Awad Abu Samra, told Ma'an that in the last week settlers have repeatedly raided the area to attack the olive tree saplings.

Operation Protective Edge was shockingly gratuitous and one-sided, strategically and morally senseless and steeped in the most grotesque hypocrisy, says Matt Carr

On Friday, American security personnel accompanying staff from the United States Consulate in Jerusalem drew their weapons on violent Israeli settlers who attacked a two vehicle U.S. convoy outside the Palestinian town of Turmusaya in the West Bank. Consulate staff were investigating a incident which took place on private Palestinian land on the first night of 2015 when six thousand recently planted olive saplings were uprooted, and dozens of old olive trees were destroyed by violent Jewish settlers from an illegal outpost, Adei Ad, near Turmusaya.

The US-Arab alliance is one of the strangest and most interesting in the world, perhaps even in history. It is certainly the most one-sided, whereby America takes everything from its Arab allies and gives them nothing in return. The US attitude is disrespectful, untactful and inflexible. Washington gives Arab governments nothing to work with and nothing to give to their people, not even a fig leaf for appearances' sake.

The most recent example of this disrespect by the US was its open contempt for its Arab allies when it voted against the draft UN Security Council resolution to end the Israeli occupation of part of the occupied Palestinian territories. This resolution is based on what is known as "international legitimacy" despite the fact that the Palestinians went to the Security Council stripped of all their historical rights. However, this did not help them or gain the acceptance of Washington, which seems to disregard the Palestinians in particular and the Arabs in general.

Arab-Australians have condemned the Coalition’s decision to vote against a United Nations security council resolution on Palestinian statehood, saying it degraded their relationship with the federal government.

Australia and the US were the only two countries that voted against the resolution this week.

At least one Palestinian has been killed in the frontier town of Rafah in the besieged Gaza Strip by Egyptian soldiers firing from across the border, sources say.

"A Palestinian citizen, aged 23, was killed by Egyptian army fire on the Egyptian-Palestinian border and the security agencies are investigating the incident to find out the motives," Gaza's Interior Ministry spokesman Iyad al-Bazm said in a message on his Facebook page on Friday.

The Egyptian forces shot the unnamed man "in the back and the bullet settled in the heart. He died on the spot," Gaza’s emergency services spokesman Ashraf al-Qudra said.

On Tuesday, Egyptian authorities said they would double the width of a security buffer zone currently under construction along the Gaza border, claiming that the move will prevent Gazans from entering Egypt.

Israeli forces have attacked Palestinian demonstrators protesting against the ongoing Israeli settlement building and the separation wall in the occupied territories.

Media reports say Israeli soldiers fired teargas and live ammunition to disperse the protesters in several West Bank towns on Friday.

Witnesses said dozens of Palestinians suffered temporary asphyxiation from teargas during the protest rallies.

If the International Criminal Court takes up Israeli government actions in the occupied Palestinian territories, it could well find specific officials guilty of breaches of the Rome Statute of 2002. Article 7 forbids “Crimes against Humanity,” which are systematically repeated war crimes. Among these offenses is murder, forcible deportation or transfer of members of a group, torture, persecution of Palestinians (an “identifiable group”) and “the crime of Apartheid.”

Collins Bartholomew, a map-publishing company that is a subsidiary of HarperCollins, said that including Israel in its “Collins Primary Geography Atlas For The Middle East” would have been “unacceptable” to their customers in the Gulf and that leaving Israel off the maps incorporated “local preferences.”

While Israel is not demarcated on the maps, the West Bank is clearly labeled.

A group of Jewish settlers attacked at dawn Friday Palestinian vehicles traveling on Jenin-Nablus road near the junction of Jaba village south of Jenin.

Around 12 vehicles carrying settlers stormed today the evacuated settlement of Tarsleh and blocked Jenin-Nablus road under military protection.

The settlers spread amongst nearby olive trees and embarked on attacking and stoning the passing Palestinian cars in the presence of Israeli soldiers, eyewitnesses said.

In initiating a war crimes probe against Israel with the International Criminal Court, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas may fall afoul of US legislation that would mandate defunding the PA. The US funds the PA to the tune of some $400 million per year.

Even if Abbas’s ICC investigation gambit does not play out — and Palestine’s route ahead at the ICC is strewn with legal obstacles — it is viewed by many leaders of the incoming Republican-controlled Congress as the latest justification to reexamine the PA’s American funding.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday said Israel expects the International Criminal Court in The Hague to reject the Palestinian application due to the fact that it is not a state.

I started writing this as a Letter to the Editor, but my anger could not be conveyed in only 150 words, so I am posting this open letter instead:

Readers expect greater accuracy from New York Times columnists.

How dare Mr. Roger Cohen suggest that Gaza, a part of my homeland, is “nowhere!”

If Mr. Cohen is at a loss to know where Gaza lies, allow me to guide him. The Gaza Strip, as well as Gaza City, were both part and parcel of Historic Palestine, between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River. Following the colossal injustice that resulted in the displacement of more than half of the Palestinian people, and then the creation of what we know today as the state of Israel, and the subsequent military occupation of the remaining Palestinian lands of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, the Gaza Strip become part and parcel of an Israeli-militarily-occupied territory. It is this military occupation under which many of my friends and colleagues were born and live to this day.

Turning up the pressure on Israel, the Palestinians announced Wednesday that they are joining the International Criminal Court to pursue war-crimes charges against the Jewish state — a risky, high-stakes move that brought threats of retaliation from Israel and criticism from the U.S.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas acted a day after suffering a defeat in the U.N. Security Council, which voted down a resolution setting a three-year deadline for the establishment of a Palestinian state on lands occupied by Israel.

"We want to complain. There's aggression against us, against our land. The Security Council disappointed us," Abbas said.

Turning to the international court at The Hague marks a major policy shift, transforming Abbas' relations with Israel from tense to openly hostile. The ultimate goal is to pressure Israel into withdrawing from the territories and agreeing to Palestinian statehood.

“There is aggression practiced against our land and our country, and the Security Council has let us down — where shall we go?” Mr. Abbas said at his headquarters in the West Bank city of Ramallah as he signed the Rome Statute, the founding charter of the court, and a number of other international conventions.

Defeated by US pressure. Its veto power. Supporting virtually everything Israel wants. Two nations united against Palestinian liberation. Determined to prevent it.

Wanting Palestinians held hostage. Under permanent bondage. Controlling virtually all aspects of their lives.

Denying them fundamental rights. Collectively punishing them. Leaving them isolated on their own. Longstanding injustice continues.

Palestine declared independence years ago. Previous articles explained. Law Professor Francis Boyle drafted its 1988 Declaration of Independence.

Predicting a "instantaneous success." De jure UN membership. Saying Palestine meets all basic requirements for statehood. Then and now.