Gideon Levy on Israel's summary executions

From Ha'aretz premium via google cache:

Yes, Israel Is Executing Palestinians Without Trial

In 2016, one doesn’t have to be Adolf Eichmann to be executed in Israel – it’s enough to be a teenage Palestinian girl with scissors.

Gideon Levy Jan 17, 2016 5:18 AM


An illustrative image of a soldier securing a Jerusalem bus. Olivier Fitoussi

We should call it like it is: Israel executes people without trial nearly every day. Any other description is a lie. If there was once discussion here about the death penalty for terrorists, now they are executed even without trial (and without discussion). If once there was debate over the rules of engagement, today it’s clear: we shoot to kill – any suspicious Palestinian.

Public Security Minister Gilad Erdan outlined the situation clearly when he said, “Every terrorist should know he will not survive the attack he is about to commit” – and almost every politician joined him in nauseating unison, from Yair Lapid on up. Never have so many licenses to kill been handed out here, nor has the finger been so itchy on the trigger.

In 2016, one doesn’t have to be Adolf Eichmann to be executed here – it’s enough to be a teenage Palestinian girl with scissors. The firing squads are active every day. Soldiers, police and civilians shoot those who stabbed Israelis, or tried to stab them or were suspected of doing so, and at those who run down Israelis in their cars or appear to have done so.

In most cases, there was no need to shoot – and certainly not to kill. In a good many of the cases, the shooters’ lives were not in danger. They shot people to death who were holding a knife or even scissors, or people who just put their hands in their pockets or lost control of their car.

They shot them to death indiscriminately – women, men, teenage girls, teenage boys. They shot them when they were standing, and even after they were no longer a threat. They shot to kill, to punish, to release their anger, and to take revenge. There is such contempt here that these incidents are barely covered in the media.
Last Saturday, soldiers at the Beka’ot checkpoint (called Hamra by the Palestinians) in the Jordan Valley killed businessman Said Abu al-Wafa, 35, a father of four, with 11 bullets. At the same time, they also killed Ali Abu Maryam, a 21-year-old farm laborer and student, with three bullets. The Israel Defense Forces did not explain the killing of the two men, except to say there was a suspicion that someone had drawn a knife. There are security cameras at the site, but the IDF has not released video footage of the incident.

Last month, other IDF soldiers killed Nashat Asfur, a father of three who worked at an Israeli chicken slaughterhouse. They shot him in his village, Sinjil, from 150 meters away, while he was walking home from a wedding. Earlier this month, Mahdia Hammad – a 40-year-old mother of four – was driving home through her village, Silwad. Border Police officers sprayed her car with dozens of bullets after they suspected she intended to run them over.

The soldiers didn’t even suspect cosmetology student Samah Abdallah, 18, of anything. Soldiers shot her father’s car “by mistake,” killing her; they had suspected a 16-year-old pedestrian, Alaa al-Hashash, of trying to stab them. They executed him as well, of course.

They also killed Ashrakat Qattanani, 16, who was holding a knife and running after an Israeli woman. First a settler ran her over with his car, and when she was lying injured on the ground, soldiers and settlers shot her at least four times. Execution – what else?

And when soldiers shot Lafi Awad, 20, in his back while he was fleeing after throwing stones, was that not an execution?

These are only a few of the cases I have documented over the past few weeks in Haaretz. The website of the human rights group B’Tselem has a list of 12 more cases of executions.

Swedish Foreign Minister Margot Wallström, one of the few ministers with a conscience left in the world, demanded that these killings be investigated. There is no demand more moral and just than this. It should have come from our own justice minister.

Israel responded with its usual howls. The prime minister said this was “outrageous, immoral and unjust.” And Benjamin Netanyahu understands those terms: That is exactly how to describe Israel’s campaign of criminal executions under his leadership.


Gideon Levy
Haaretz Correspondent
 

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Below is a request from our friends at the Palestinian Youth Movement and Middle East Children's Alliance to contribute to a fundraising campaign in support of Syrian refugees in Lebanon. We urge you to support this effort as generously as you are able. 

While Israel, the United States, and its other regional allies such as Saudia Arabia, Turkey and the Gulf States, are happy to see the destruction of the “Arab Spring” wherever it may have blossomed, we remain in solidarity with all struggles for human emancipation. The range of forces and interests arrayed against these struggles has been on display in abundance throughout the “Arab Spring,” and nowhere more than in Syria. 

As a network, we hold varying positions on the Syrian conflict, and have different analyses of which forces are most to blame for the immense devastation. However, as people dedicated to human liberation, we all recognize the immensity of the human catastrophe which has been the result of the Syrian conflict.

Join PYM and MECA to Support Refugees from Syria Today View this email in your browser Urgent Action Needed: Support displaced children and families from Syria in the refugee camps of Lebanon   Dear Friends and Community Members, The situation in Syria has become one of the worst humanitarian crises in recent history. The United Nations is now calling for $4.2 billion in relief for the people of Syria and those who have been displaced over the three years of violence that continues to devastate the country. The facts below highlight the urgency of the situation and our collective need to act and support our brothers and sisters in the region. More than 7 million people in Syria have left their homes Over 136,000 people have been killed More than 2.4 million people have fled the country, seeking refuge in Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey, Egypt, Iraq and North Africa More than 900,000 Syrian refugees are displaced in Lebanon More than 50,000 Palestinian refugees from Syria have sought refuge in Lebanon Children comprise over half the refugee population in Lebanon  The Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM) - Bay Area chapter and MECA are calling for urgent action from everyone to help end this most recent nakba, catastrophe.   Coming from a community who has struggled for more than sixty-five years against continuous displacement, PYM - Bay Area stands in solidarity with our brothers and sisters in Syria, and we call upon our local community to join us in supporting our communities in the homeland in combatting the detrimental effects of forced displacement. In partnership with the Middle East Children’s Alliance (MECA), PYM - Bay Area is launching an online donation drive to help raise funds for education projects and community support for children from Syria in Lebanon’s refugee camps.  The drive will culminate in a cultural event on March 22nd to gather as a community and raise as much money as possible for refugees from Syria. We hope to coordinate our efforts with as many individuals, organizations, and others who would like to help. The time to act is now. You can safely send any tax-deductible contribution, no matter how big or small, online, through the MECA website today.           Since the beginning of the conflict in 2011, millions of Syrians have fled their homes, with more than 900,000 of them seeking refuge in Lebanon. Among them, 80,000 Palestinian and Syrian refugees have sought refuge in the already overcrowded and impoverished Palestinian refugee camps of Lebanon, where they rely largely upon the generosity of other refugee families for support.  To make matters worse for displaced families, this winter has been one of the harshest in recorded history in the region, leaving many without shelter, heat, or food. The brutal cold that has swept through many countries of the Arab world cannot be disconnected from the changing global weather patterns, most recent of which devastated millions in the Philippines with Typhoon Haiyan. Needless to say, it is the most marginalized populations that carry the burden of these crises. We recognize that our struggle is bound with the struggle of others across the many borders that separate us, and we cannot imagine justice for us until we have realized justice for all. With this in mind, we will contribute 5% of our fundraising efforts to our brothers and sisters in the Philippines who also need our help. Donate Now Al Nakab Center for Youth Activities The funds raised will go to support the work of Al Nakab Center for Youth Activities in Burj el Barajneh refugee camp in Beirut, Lebanon. Al Nakab Center was founded in July 2013 as a joint project between Ma’an Youth Group and Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM) - Lebanon to address the growing needs of Syrian and Palestinian families seeking refuge in the camp as a result of the protracted violence in Syria. The center is entirely run by independent grassroots Palestinian and Lebanese youth organizers in Beirut and offers educational and cultural activities to Syrian and Palestinian refugee youth living in the camp, including English, Arabic and Math classes for Syrian students through its accelerated learning program. Many children who have fled Syria have had to seek alternative schooling to the Lebanese public school system, which is stretched over capacity and where integration into the Lebanese curriculum has been difficult due to language differences. Al Nakab Center has thus created a special accelerated learning curriculum for Syrian refugees in order to fill in this gap, and meet children’s educational needs in ways the formal schooling system cannot.  Designed according to the needs highlighted by the refugee families themselves, Al Nakab Center also functions as a resource institution for displaced Syrian and Palestinian families who need access to a physical gathering space and resources such as its computer lab, which provides internet access for families in the camp. As such, the center has been vital to those who now suffer from post-traumatic stress and isolation as a result of the refugee crisis from Syria. The center needs $10,680 in order to continue its programming for the next 6 months. To find out more about Al Nakab Center, visit their Facebook page, or contact PYM atpalyouth.usa@gmail.com for more information. For more information, please contact palyouth.usa@gmail.com or visit our website at http://www.pymusa.org/.

 

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Protest outside G4S headquarters on Palestinian prisoners day

Wednesday 17 April 2013 (4.30pm - 7pm)

Outside G4S UK & Ireland head office at 105 Victoria Street, London SW1E 6QT

War on Want calls on G4S to end its complicity in Israel’s prison system.

On 17 April, Palestinian Prisoners Day, War on Want joins a number of Palestine solidarity and human rights organisations in a protest outside G4S headquarters in London.

In 2007, G4S signed a contract with the Israeli Prison Authority to provide security systems and other services for major Israeli prisons. G4S provides systems for the Ketziot and Megiddo prisons, which hold Palestinian political prisoners from occupied Palestinian territory inside Israel. Article 76 of the Fourth Geneva Convention prohibits the transfer of prisoners from occupied territory into the territory of the occupier.

G4S also provides equipment for Ofer prison, located in the occupied West Bank, and for Kishon and Moskobiyyeh detention facilities, at which human rights organisations have documented systematic torture and ill treatment of Palestinian prisoners, including child prisoners.

Beyond Israel's prison system, G4S also provides equipment and services to Israeli checkpoints in the West Bank that form part of the route of Israel’s illegal Wall and to the terminals isolating the occupied and besieged territory of Gaza. G4S signed contracts for equipment and services for the West Bank Israeli Police headquarters and to private businesses based in illegal Israeli settlements.

Join us on 17 April outside G4S UK & Ireland head office to send a message to G4S that complicity in Israel’s prison system and illegal occupation is unacceptable.

Protest called by Palestine Solidarity Campaign
Supported by: Action for Palestinian Children, Amos Trust, Fire Brigades Union, Friends of Al-Aqsa UK, ICAHD UK, Jews for Justice for Palestinians, Lib-Dems Friends of Palestine, Public and Commercial Services Union (PCS), Stop G4S Campaign, UNISON, UNITE the Union, and War on Want

http://www.waronwant.org/news/events/17853-protest-outside-g4s-headquarters-on-palestinian-prisoners-day

UCU activist writes: It's about the Palestinians stupid

Mike Cushman 

To no one’s surprise a Zionist claque has swiftly assembled to denounce the findings of the Fraser vs UCU Employment Tribunal. It would appear that according to these voices the only business a the next meeting of UCU’s national executive will not be fighting the massive cuts in UK higher and further education but debating when and in what format to reissue The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Hysterical rubbish, of course but we have to explore why the reaction is so unbalanced. Fraser and his legal advisors chose the legal terrain and the scope of their action, not UCU. They chose their schedule of witnesses who declaimed and dissembled but failed to address the matters that Fraser wished the tribunal to consider.

Anthony White, counsel for UCU, demolished their testimony but was only able to do so with such effectiveness because they were such poor witnesses.  Ever since the tribunal, Fraser’s self-proclaimed friends have been picking over 50 pages of closely argued legal findings trying to claim they are simultaneously technically narrow and the most wide-ranging antisemitic text of recent years.

Hirsh and Susskind et al fail to grasp at least two very basic points. They solipsistically believe it is all about the Jews; they cannot understand or believe that it is about the Palestinians.

For the vast majority of those active in support of Palestinian rights it was the oppression of Palestinians that led them to activity.  They only started to consider Zionism as an ideology when they started to enquire why Israel was behaving so badly and so criminally.  At that point they encountered the Zionist justification for occupation and oppression and took a stance of either deploring the degradation of a potentially positive movement or took a more radical stance of identifying Zionist ideology, in itself, at the heart of the problem.

The absence of the Palestinians even as objects, let alone actors, in the Zionist exclusionary Jewish narrative tells us all we need to know about why being anti-Zionist is radically different from being an anti-Semite.  Anti-Zionism is a stance against a pernicious anti-Palestinian racism.  Zionism is an ideology that allows Israel to behave as it does while simultaneously believing that Israel conforms to the norms of liberal, law-based democracy.

Secondly, they continually ask, ‘why only boycott Israel?’  The Palestinian call for BDS is the only extant call for boycott by a significant national liberation movement.  Other movements and peoples call for different forms of support each of which must be considered on its merits. 

Israel’s crimes are not measured on a Richter scale of oppression against those of China or Burma or Zimbabwe and only be the subject of campaigns when they reach the hotly contested pinnacle at the top of the Premiership of abuse.  That the crimes are profound and continuing is a sufficient justification. 

Other regimes are the subject of regular denunciation and sanction by western governments, Israel is singled out not by our opposition but by the condoning of its actions by the USA; its massive military and civil aid; and its systematic cover at the Security Council.  Similarly the EU treats Israel, in defiance of geography, as a surrogate, if displaced, part of Europe and grants the privileges of association without requiring the fulfilment of Council of Europe human rights standards.

None of this is deny the possibility, and occasional reality, of support for Palestinian rights being motivated by malice towards Jews.  We have a duty to criticise and condemn such behaviour when we see it and the Palestinian rights movement is, in general, self-aware and self critical on this.  Fraser and his team were unable to discover any such motivation behind the actions of UCU officers and activists and are now reduced to asserting that its absence can only be the result of a wider collaboration to conceal it.  Such concealment is beyond the limited ability of UCU, PSC, BRICUP, the Employment Tribunal Service or other presumed conspirators.  Its absence is just that, an absence.

Mike Cushman is a member of BRICUP and is a UCU branch secretary and a regular speaker in favour of Palestinian rights at successive UCU congresses. His interventions were regularly referred to by Fraser and his witnesses.

UCU Tribunal: Zionists try three approaches - All bogus

Well I'm sure that there'll be more zionist takes on the Fraser v UCU Employment Tribunal disaster that befell them but three approaches seem to have emerged since publication of the damning report.

First out of the traps, I believe, was David Hirsh on Facebook, claiming that the Tribunal itself was antisemitic.  Looking at the comments on that page and on his more recent Engage piece, that argument does have some traction among zionists.  Lesley Klaff, apparently a leading "lawfare" advocate, also claims the Tribunal was antisemitic.

I have already posted on Sarah Annes Brown's attempt to pass the disaster off as some kind of technical issue.  She's also recently tried to make out that the Tribunal "judged [Palestine solidarity activists]  unfit to recognise racism".  I'm not sure if she was joking or lying but it is always hard to tell with her.

Paul Usiskin of some zionist "left" group in the UK posted another "we wuz robbed" piece in The Daily Beast's Open Zion slot.  Some wag on twitter calls Open Zion, Openly Zionist.  If you read Paul Usiskin's piece you'll see why.

But now there has been another entrant into the contest.  David Newman, writing in the Jerusalem Post, didn't even mention the technicalities involved.  I've seen his stuff before and he does seem to value his integrity more highly than your average zionist.  He does flirt with the idea of the UCU being antisemitic:

But equally, not every case of anti-Israel sentiment can be attributed to anti-semitism, and we have to be very careful not to throw the anti-semitism argument back in the face of every organization and every individual who are critical of Israeli government policy. When we do so, we cheapen anti-semitism and make it all the more difficult to garner support for the fight against real, hard core, anti-semitism when it occurs – and occur it does, all too often – even at universities.

The forthcoming 4th International Conference of the Global Forum for Combating Antisemitism, to be held in Jerusalem at the end of May and jointly organized by the Ministries for Public Diplomacy and for Diaspora Affairs, along with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, has a chance to seriously examine this topic. However, based on past conferences and looking at the all too familiar line up of professional anti-semitism fighters, this conference will not offer any significant new insights. The conference will be used, yet again, as an excuse for crying on each others' shoulder, and bashing the entire world for being anti-semitic. There will be no attempt to differentiate between legitimate criticism of Israel (even amongst its friends) and anti-semitism, and it will provide little in the way of any serious introspection as to how the world should be dealing with the issue of anti-semitism, beyond the context of criticism of Israel.

So what was wrong with the Tribunal?

There is one sentence in the ruling which raises serious questions concerning the intelligence or understanding of the tribunal members. They write: "a belief in the Zionist project or an attachment to Israel cannot amount to a protected characteristic. It is not intrinsically a part of Jewishness..." (para 150). The use of the term "Zionist project" is highly prejudiced from the outset. It is a term which is used by those who are highly critical of Zionism as an ideology of national liberation. It is a value loaded term which would indicate the political positions of those who use it. Equally, the idea that some form of Zionist attachment – be it of the far left pro-peace camp, or the right wing pro-settlement proponents, be it a secular Zionism or one deeply rooted in religion - is not an intrinsic part of Jewish identity and behavior for well over 95 percent of the global Jewish population, would indicate a prior prejudice, or simple ignorance, on their part.

So there's the third tack.  Failing to take into account that, according to the writer, most Jews support a state based on colonial settlement, ethnic cleansing and segregationist laws and that therefore, zionism should be considered an intrinsic aspect of the Jewish identity, indeed, under UK and other law, a "protected characteristic".  So we end where we began.  If zionism is taken to be intrinsic to the Jewish identity, then opposition to zionism could be judged to be precisely the same thing as antisemitism.

It's this third approach that is the most insidious and dangerous. It ties in with the so-called EUMC working definition of antisemitism and I suspect it is the reason that no one has so far mentioned this case in the mainstream media.  And none of the zionist big guns have said anything about it.  Even Anthony Julius has gone to ground.  I suspect that gradually hasbara journalists will mention, as if in passing, the failure of British justice in this case, maybe whilst dealing with a genuine case of harassment or of antisemitism or of some other form of racism.  But if zionists are going to mis-define antisemitism they will have to mis-define Jews.  That would be damaging for a time to both Jews and to Palestinians and their supporters.

65th Anniversary of Plan Dalet - Blueprint for the Ethnic Cleansing of the Palestinians

This is from the Institute for Middle East Understanding:

PLAN DALET -

"Transfer" in Zionist Thinking

• From the earliest days of modern political Zionism, its advocates grappled with the problem of creating a Jewish majority state in a part of the world where Palestinian Arabs were the overwhelming majority of the population. For many, the solution became known as "transfer," a euphemism for ethnic cleansing.


• As far back as 1895, the father of modern political Zionism, Theodor Herzl,wrote: "We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it any employment in our own country... expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly."


• By August 1937, "transfer" was a major subject of discussion at the Twentieth Zionist Congress in Zurich, Switzerland. Alluding to the systematic dispossession of Palestinian peasants (fellahin) that Zionist organizations had been engaged in for years, David Ben-Gurion, who would become Israel's first prime minister in 1948, stated:
  
  

  "You are no doubt aware of the [Jewish National Fund's] activity in this respect. Now a transfer of a completely different scope will have to be carried out. In many parts of the country new settlement will not be possible without transferring the Arabfellahin." He concluded: "Jewish power [in Palestine], which grows steadily, will also increase our possibilities to carry out this transfer on a large scale."



• In June 1938, Ben-Gurion told a meeting of the Jewish Agency: "I support compulsory transfer. I don't see anything immoral in it."


• In December 1940, Joseph Weitz, director of the Jewish National Fund's Lands Department, which was tasked with acquiring land for the Zionist enterprise in Palestine, wrote in his diary:
  

  "There is no way besides transferring the Arabs from here to the neighboring countries, and to transfer all of them, save perhaps for [the Arabs of] Bethlehem, Nazareth and Old Jerusalem. Not one village must be left, not one [bedouin] tribe. And only after this transfer will the country be able to absorb millions of our brothers and the Jewish problem will cease to exist. There is no other solution."

Details of Plan Dalet

• On March 10, 1948, Zionist political and military leaders, including Ben-Gurion, met in Tel Aviv and formally adopted Plan Dalet (or Plan D). The operational military orders specified which Palestinian population centers should be targeted and laid out in detail a blueprint for their forcible depopulation and destruction. It called for:



"Mounting operations against enemy population centers located inside or near our defensive system in order to prevent them from being used as bases by an active armed force. These operations can be divided into the following categories:

"Destruction of villages (setting fire to, blowing up, and planting mines in the debris), especially those population centers which are difficult to control continuously.

"Mounting search and control operations according to the following guidelines: encirclement of the village and conducting a search inside it. In the event of resistance, the armed force must be destroyed and the population must be expelled outside the borders of the state."



• The Haganah (soon to be Israeli army) launched military operations under Plan Dalet at the beginning of April 1948. Although attacks by Zionist forces against Palestinian population centers actually began a few days after the UN Partition Plan was passed on November 29, 1947, with the adoption of Plan Dalet expulsions accelerated and became systematic, marking a new phase in the conflict in which Zionist and then Israeli forces went on "the offensive," in the words of Israeli historian Benny Morris.


• Following Israel's establishment on May 14, 1948, the new Israeli government set up an unofficial body, the "Transfer Committee," to oversee the destruction of Palestinian towns and villages or their repopulation with Jews, and to prevent displaced Palestinians from returning to their homes. In a report presented to Ben-Gurion in June 1948, the three-man committee, which included the JNF's Weitz, called for the "destruction of villages as much as possible during military operations."

Results

• By the time the state of Israel was declared on May 14, 1948, more than 200Palestinian villages had already been emptied as people fled in fear or were forcibly expelled by Zionist forces, and approximately 175,000 Palestinians had been made refugees. By 1949, at least 750,000 Palestinians had been made refugees, losing their land, homes and other belongings in what became known as the "Nakba" ("catastrophe"). Their flight was accelerated by massacres such as the one that took place on April 9, 1948, at Deir Yassin near Jerusalem, where approximately 100 Palestinian men, women, and children were murdered by Zionist paramilitaries. Today, refugees displaced during Israel's creation and their descendants number approximately 7.1 million people.


• Some 400 Palestinian towns and villages, including vibrant urban centers, were systematically destroyed or taken over by Israeli Jews. Most of them were demolished to prevent the return of their Palestinian residents, now refugees outside of what would become Israel's internationally recognized borders, or internally displaced inside of them.


• Only about 150,000 Palestinians remained inside what became Israel, many of them internally displaced people. Although they were granted Israeli citizenship, they were governed by Israeli military rule until 1966, had most of their land taken from them, and continue to suffer widespread, systematic discrimination today.

Controversy Surrounding Plan Dalet

• Over the years, Plan Dalet has been the subject of controversy, with some Israelis and their supporters claiming that it was not in fact a blueprint for expulsion or ethnic cleansing.


• Benny Morris, one of the leading so-called "new historians" of Israel, wrote in his landmark work The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem: 1947-1949, that Plan Dalet was "a strategic-ideological anchor and basis for expulsions by front, district, brigade and battalion commanders" providing "post facto a formal persuasive covering note to explain their actions." Morris, a right-wing Zionist ideologically who has at times himself denied there was a premeditated plan for the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, noted that from the beginning of April 1948, there were "Clear traces of an expulsion policy on both national and local levels with respect to certain key districts and localities and a general 'atmosphere of transfer' are detectable in statements made by Zionist officials and officers."


• In his memoirs, which were censored by the Israeli military but leaked to The New York Times in 1979, the late Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin recalled a conversation he had in July 1948 with Ben-Gurion, when Rabin was an officer in the Israeli army, regarding the fate of more than 50,000 Palestinian residents of the cities of Lydda and Ramleh. Rabin wrote:
  

  "We walked outside, Ben-Gurion accompanying us. [Yigal] Allon repeated his question, 'What is to be done with the Palestinian population?' Ben-Gurion waved his hand in a gesture which said 'Drive them out!'" Rabin added, "I agreed that it was essential to drive the inhabitants out."

Further Reading

• All That Remains: The Palestinian Villages Occupied and Depopulated by Israel in 1948, by Walid Khalidi (1992).


• The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited, by Benny Morris (2004).


• The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, by Ilan Pappé (2006).


• Expulsion of the Palestinians: The Concept of "Transfer" in Zionist Political Thought, 1882-1948, by Nur Masalha (1992).


• War for Palestine: Rewriting the History of 1948, edited by Avi Shlaim and Eugene Rogan (2007).

Question: What do Israel's elections mean for peace?

Answer:  Nothing.

But have a look at the IMEU site anyway or have a listen here.

Same racism different year

There's an article on the Washington Post site headed, Why demographics are still a concern for some Israeli Jews.  Here's a taste:

in Israel, Jewish policymakers are heralding the fact that the country’s Jewish population has passed the 6 million mark for the first time — a historically significant number, they say, because that’s the number of Jews who were killed in the Holocaust.

“It’s a great joy to know there are more than 6 million Jews in Israel,” Dina Porat, chief historian of Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust museum, told the Guardian.

It’s cause for celebration, but the 6 million figure doesn’t entirely put Israeli Jews at ease.

The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics released its own figures this week, predicting that the number of Arabs in Israel and Palestine will equal the number of Jews by 2016 and exceed it by 2020, buoyed in part by the Palestinians’ overall higher birthrate.

All of this of course excludes the millions of Palestinians who have been ethnically cleansed from Palestine altogether.

Learning about the Palestinians comes at a price

I was just looking for a book called The Palestinians by Jonathan Dimbleby, a BBC Radio 4 presenter.  Easy enough to find. It's on Amazon among other places.  But look at the prices:

Formats Amazon Price New from Used from Expand Hardcover -- £28.98 £4.39 Expand Paperback -- £325.23 £7.17

Now why would someone pay £325.23 when they can pay £4.39?

There are three reviews which might explain the bizarre price range:

Amazon.com: 5.0 out of 5 stars  3 reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A must for all who want to know more about the Palestinian conflict 7 May 2011

By strawberry reader - Published on Amazon.com

Format:Hardcover

A wonderful book full of history and insights, but a great shame that pgs 97 - 113 were missing. How many copies were like this?

5.0 out of 5 stars Great Book. 21 Nov 2012

By Asdis Lara Runolfsdottir - Published on Amazon.com

Format:Hardcover

I read this book in 1982 when Israel bombed Beirut. It opened my eyes to a world I knew nothing about. Now, once again, I watch Israel use it's power and might to attack. This book will go on my holiday wish list.

5.0 out of 5 stars So glad to have found this book! 16 Jan 2012

By Mary J. Pohl - Published on Amazon.com

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

Thank you so much for making this book available. It is very informative even though it was written decades ago. The book arrived quickly and in extrememly good condition.

Ah, that would be the three hundred and twenty five quid one.

Still it's worth finding a price that suits you.  I remember reading it back in the eighties and whilst much has been published on Palestine since then it could well be worth a Christmas look at.

In your eyes a sandstorm?

Another day another question mark. In Your Eyes a Sandstorm is journalist and author (and friend of mine) Arthur Neslen's latest book on Palestine and is subtitled "ways of being Palestinian".  It's a wonderful book and it reminds me of the autobiography of Malcolm X as told to Alex Haley.  Arthur has Palestinians from different generations of struggle and from the various Palestinian communities: West Bank, Gaza, Jerusalem, Israel and the diaspora, detail their autobiographies to him with the author providing historical, geographical or political background, together with his own questions and thoughts as appropriate.

Here's the description from the publishers, University of California Press:

Who are the Palestinians? In this compelling book of interviews, Arthur Neslen reaches beyond journalistic clichés to let a wide variety of Palestinians answer the question for themselves. Beginning in the present with Bisan and Abud, two traumatized children from Jenin’s refugee camp, the book’s narrative arcs backwards through the generations to come full circle with two elderly refugees from villages that the children were named after. Along the way, Neslen recounts a history of land, resistance, exile, and trauma that begins to explain Abud’s wish to become a martyr and Bisan’s dream of a Palestine empty of Jews. Senior Fatah and Hamas figures relate key events of the Palestinian experience—the Second Intifada, Oslo Process, First Intifada, Thawra, 1967 War, the Naqba, and the Great Arab Revolt of 1936—in their own words. The extraordinary voices of women, children, farmers, fighters, drug dealers, policeman, doctors, and others, spanning the political divide from Salafi Jihadists to Israeli soldiers, bring the Palestinian story to life even as their words sow seeds of hope in the scorched Palestinian earth.

The book takes its title from a poem by Tawfiq Ziad.