Bi-Weekly Brief for February 14, 2022
A one page digest of Israel’s ongoing dispossession of Palestinian land and livelihoods, and Palestinian resistance.
Powerful Amnesty report on Israeli apartheid called ‘absurd’ by US and ‘antisemitic’ by Israel
On Feb. 1, after a 4-year study, Amnesty International issued a 278-page report, Israel’s Apartheid against Palestinians: Cruel System of Domination and Crime against Humanity, along with a curriculum, video and toolkit. The report states that since its establishment in 1948 Israel has sought to dominate and control Palestinians and that it maintains an apartheid regime in the entirety of the territory between the Mediterranean Sea and Jordan River in violation of international law.
Heavily criticized by Israel, US officials, and US mainstream Jewish groups, the report was completely ignored by the New York Times and debunked by the Wall Street Journal, while Newsweek and MSNBC had pieces defending it. Michael Benyair, a former Israeli Attorney General, in a Feb. 12 op ed agreed that Israel is an apartheid regime and “it is time for the international community to recognize this reality as well.” But Tom Nides, the new US Ambassador to Israel who had wasted no time in calling the report ‘absurd,’ told the Times of Israel on Feb. 9 that applying the word apartheid to Israel is ‘appalling.’ He said he is ‘100% a Zionist’ who wants to keep alive ‘the vision of two states.’ He claimed his decision to forego visiting settlements is not intended to signal that they are illegitimate, but rather to avoid doing things ‘that agitate people.’ US support for Israel, he said, is strongly bipartisan and ‘rock-solid.’
Army unit that killed elderly Palestinian-American terrorizes the West Bank on behalf of settlers
The US has said it is ‘not satisfied’ with the Israeli army’s decision to reprimand the commander and suspend two officers of the Netzah Yehuda army unit involved in the death of an elderly Palestinian-American, Omar Abdalmajeed As’ad. A Feb. 9 Haaretz piece describes the violence inflicted on Palestinians by the Netzah Yehuda brigade ‘just for laughs’ and the army’s reluctance to dissolve it as this would be “a declaration of war for the settler leadership. Their view on the ground is that this battalion belongs to them, that it’s a force that works for the settlement enterprise.” Soldiers and/or settlers in Feb. have destroyed Palestinian homes, cisterns, water tanks and pipelines, bulldozed farmlands, uprooted olive trees, attacked West Bank farmers and protestors, and repeatedly fired on farmers and fishermen in Gaza. The army also carried out an extra-judicial killing of 3 Palestinians in Nablus who were allegedly on a ‘wanted’ list and killed a 17-year-old during a protest near Jenin.
Bitterly contested settler outpost of Evyatar is on its way to ‘legalization’
Early in February, outgoing Israeli Attorney General Avichai Mendelblit issued an opinion outlining a procedure for legalizing the settler outpost of Evyatar, which was erected on privately-owned Palestinian land near the village of Beita in May 2021. Since then, Beita’s residents have held weekly protests during which 9 Palestinians have been killed and more than 5,300 injured. There are some 140 settler outpostsestablished without official permission throughout the West Bank, some of which are described by Patrick Kingsley in a rare New York Times piece about settler violence.
Water Fact
Israel’s new 20-foot-high, 40-mile-long wall that penetrates deep into the ground as it encircles the Gaza Strip is severely impacting wildlife, biodiversity and water. Building the wall has further polluted Gaza’s depleted water supply and undermined the stability of the coastal aquifer. By stopping the flow of water towards the Strip, the wall prevents the water-starved territory from benefiting from rainfall outside its borders. In its Apartheid report Amnesty International states: “Israel’s blockade of the Gaza Strip and other discriminatory policies have created a water and sanitation crisis characterized by an acute shortage of potable water, reduced ability to filter water and water pollution. The routine power cuts and lack of equipment and resources to treat sewage, wastewater and solid waste puts the population of Gaza at increased risks of waterborne diseases and other health problems in the context of a collapsing health sector” (p.195).
Compiled by The Alliance for Water Justice in Palestine
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