Issue No : 83
Palestinian Cultural Organization Malaysia
24th February, 2014
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24th February, 2014
Issue No : 83
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Israel exploits peace talks to demolish more Palestinian homes in Jerusalem P6
He hinted that settlers might not be evacuated as part of deal
Kerry: Israel’s security is top of my priorities
FEATURED STORY
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Economic boycott costs Israel 8 billion dollars
P9 The right of return is for individuals to decide, not for Abbas to concede Report: Egypt closed the Rafah crossing for 96 days in 6 months 2 |
ARTICLE
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Palestinian Cultural Organization Malaysia
Issue No : 83
24th February, 2014
CONTENTS News of Palestine
Kerry: Israel’s security is top of my priorities Israel exploits peace talks to demolish more Palestinian homes in Jerusalem Economic boycott costs Israel 8 billion dollars Organization: Over 200 Palestinians in administrative detention 9 Palestinian refugees proclaimed dead in Syria Report: Egypt closed the Rafah crossing for 96 days in 6 months
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Articles & Analyses
The right of return is for individuals to decide, not for Abbas to concede
Palestinian Cultural Organization Malaysia
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24th February, 2014
Issue No : 83
News of Palestine
He hinted that settlers might not be evacuated as part of deal
Kerry: Israel’s security is top of my priorities
20/2/2014 Israeli’s security interests are a top priority when considering a plan for lasting peace between Palestinians and Israelis, US Secretary of State John Kerry said. In an interview broadcast on Israel’s Channel 2 TV on Thursday, Kerry said he was committed to achieving his task to the fullest. “Israel’s security interests are top of my priorities and one of the most important issues for the United States.” Kerry also said that Israel will not sign any deal with the Palestinians unless its security concerns are put to rest, and hinted that evacuation of Israeli settlers from the West Bank may not be necessary. Israeli media praised Kerry’s remarks and described them as important. Kerry brushed aside criticism from senior Israeli officials including Economy Minister Naftali Bennett and Defence Minister Moshe Ya’alon who called Kerry an “obsessed Christian” saying “I do not want to squabble like children. I want to focus on the important issues. People who know me know that when I focus on something I do all I can to achieve it.”
Source: Agencies 4 |
Palestinian Cultural Organization Malaysia
Issue No : 83
24th February, 2014
Israel exploits peace talks to demolish more Palestinian homes in Jerusalem
20/2/2014
going negotiations between the Palestinian Authority (PA) and Israel.
The number of Palestinian homes demolished by Israeli occupation forces in Jerusalem since the beginning of this year has increase sharply as no political pressure is exerted on the Israeli government, an Israeli newspaper said on Thursday.
The officials, according to Haaretz, said this opened the door wide for the strong return of the homes’ demolition policy. They also said that the current calmness in occupied Jerusalem facilitates carrying out demolition activities.
According to data from the Jerusalem Municipality, Haaretz said, 12 Palestinian homes were demolished since the beginning of this year, most of them were inhabited compared with 25 homes demolished in 2013, and most of those were uninhabited. Israeli officials put the increase down to the absence of political pressure put on the Israeli government since the beginning of the on-
Haaretz reported an account of a Jerusalemite family from the Silwan neighbourhood. M, a Jewish woman married to Mohamed Swahar, said Israeli police suddenly broke into her house with dogs and scared her children. They did not give the family time to dress the children or to collect any personal belongings. This was at 6am. According to the newspaper, the police beat the father because he was trying to reach his children to placate their fears. The family’s house was built 18-year-old ago and the family have tried to obtain necessary building permits, to no avail. M said, “I never imagined that one day I will be treated in this inhumane way,” she said. The family is now living in a tent donated to them by the InternaSource: MEMO tional Red Cross.
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24th February, 2014
Issue No : 83
21/2/2014
Economic boycott costs Israel 8 billion dollars
Anadolu news agency quoted economic experts as saying that economic boycott would cost Israel U.S. $ 8 billion, in addition to the dismissal of more than 10 thousand Israeli workers. The EU, which is considered Israel’s second largest market for exports (32% of the export market), has officially started academic, commercial and investment boycott to Israel. European countries have started since the beginning of 2014 banning Israeli settlements’ products, according to John Gatt-Rutter, the EU representative to the West Bank.
Minister Yair Lapid as saying that the boycott campaign could cost the economy nearly $8 billion annually, in addition to the dismissal of more than 10 thousand Three European companies Israeli workers. bidding to build private seaports in Haifa and Ashdod Israeli Export Institute has exdropped out this week of the pressed fears earlier this year of Israeli government’s tender declining GDP and Israeli exports due to economic boycott. For to the EU countries that represent its part Deutsche Bank, Ger- 32% of Israel’s export market. many’s largest bank, declared For his part, Antoine Shalhat, a its boycott to Israel’s Hapoalim Palestinian political analyst at Bank. the Palestinian Center for Israeli Gracie Barhoum, specialist in Studies, said the Israeli will witIsraeli economy, stated that ness larger declines in gross doEuropean boycott to Israel is mestic product and labor market. still individual cases carried out by EU companies and institutions, but it has achieved an important part of its aims, and caused a state of panic within the Israeli government.
25% of Palestinians living in the OPT are unemployed. Anadolu news agency quoted economic experts as saying that economic boycott would cost Israel U.S. $ 8 billion, in addition to the dismissal of more than 10 thousand Israeli workers.
The EU, which is considered Israel’s second largest market for exports (32% of the export market), has officially started academic, commercial and investment boycott to Israel. European countries have started since the beginning of 2014 banning Israeli settlements’ products, according to John According to Gracie and Shal- Gatt-Rutter, the EU representahat, Israeli government will start tive to the West Bank. dismissing Arab workers as a re- Three European companies bidsponse to EU decision to boycott ding to build private seaports in Israeli exports. Haifa and Ashdod dropped out
According to Israel Central Bu- this week of the Israeli governGracie quoted Israel’s Finance reau of Statistics, approximately ment’s tender due to economic 6 |
Palestinian Cultural Organization Malaysia
Issue No : 83
24th February, 2014
boycott. For its part Deutsche Bank, Germany’s largest bank, declared its boycott to Israel’s Hapoalim Bank. Gracie Barhoum, specialist in Israeli economy, stated that European boycott to Israel is still individual cases carried out by EU companies and institutions, but it has achieved an important part of its aims, and caused a state of panic within the Israeli government. Gracie quoted Israel’s Finance Minister Yair Lapid as saying that the boycott campaign could cost the economy nearly $8 billion annually, in addition to the dismissal of more than 10 thousand Israeli workers. Israeli Export Institute has expressed fears earlier this year of declining GDP and Israeli exports to the EU countries that represent 32% of Israel’s export market. For his part, Antoine Shalhat, a Palestinian political analyst at the Palestinian Center for Israeli Studies, said the Israeli will witness larger declines in gross domestic product and labor market. According to Gracie and Shalhat, Israeli government will start dismissing Arab workers as a response to EU decision to boycott Israeli exports. According to Israel Central Bureau of Statistics, approximately 25% of Palestinians living in the OPT are unemployed.
Source: PIC
Palestinian Cultural Organization Malaysia
Organization: Over 200 Palestinians in administrative detention
20/2/2014 The number of Palestinian administrative detainees in Israeli jails recently passed 200, a human rights organization said Tuesday. Usama Maqbol, a lawyer from the Palestinian human rights group Solidarity Foundation for Human Rights, said that the rise in the number of administrative detainees is the result of an ongoing campaign of daily arrests by Israeli forces. He said that this campaign is targeting recently freed prisoners and leaders of Palestinian political groups, highlighting that 90 percent of administrative detainees are from those two categories, he added. Israeli human rights groups B’tselem reported in October that 140 Palestinians were being kept in administrative detention in Israeli prisons, down from a high of nearly 1,000 in 2002. The new numbers, however, suggest a renewed push on the part of Israeli occupation authorities. Maqbol explained that the orders for administrative detention come from the regional military commanders of each region according to undisclosed information, and that the orders do not rely on evidence or confessions. The information is even kept secret from defense lawyers, he added. Administrative detention refers to the tactic of keeping a prisoner without charge or trial for extended periods of time, often due to “security” concerns. Israel routinely uses this tactic on detained Palestinians, even though international law stipulates it only be used in excepSource: Ma’an tional circumstances. | 7
24th February, 2014
Issue No : 83
New waves of Palestinian refugees to Europe
9 Palestinian refugees proclaimed dead in Syria
23/2/2014 Nine Palestinian refugees died in Syria during the past week, including seven who were starved to death due to the continued siege imposed on Yarmouk Refugee camp southern Damascus.
posed on Palestinian refugees camps in Syria.
The Euro-mid Observer warned of new sinking accidents waiting to happen similar to the sinking of migrant boats carryThe other two victims died un- ing refugees and “illegal immider torture in Syrian prisons after grants” during the fourth quartheir kidnapping according to the ter of 2013. sources. The Geneva-based observer On the other hand, a mine detec- said in its statement issued on tion team entered Yarmouk refu- Tuesday that hundreds of Palgee camp on Monday as part of the estinian and Syrian refugees agreement to neutralize the camp, have reached Europe via Italy the Action Group added. during the past three weeks in In a related context, the Euro-mid an attempt to have access to Observer for Human Rights said other European cities looking that the number of Palestinian asy- for better conditions for asylum lum seekers fleeing from Syria to seekers. Europe has noticeably increased The European human rights during the past few weeks due to center pointed out that the refuthe ongoing clashes and siege im- gees have been often smuggled 8 |
in rickety wooden vessels in a very dangerous journey amid volatile atmosphere in the Mediterranean Sea, calling on European countries particularly Italy, Malta and Greece to take necessary precautions to prevent such disasters. The Euro-mid Observer’s statement called on European Union to “provide safe routes for refugees fleeing from the bloody conflict in Syria.” The statement stressed the need for close coordination and cooperation between EU countries and the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) to facilitate refugees’ access to Europe.
Source: Agencies
Palestinian Cultural Organization Malaysia
Issue No : 83
24th February, 2014
Report: Egypt closed the Rafah crossing for 96 days in 6 months
19/2/2014 Palestinian ofďŹ cial statistics showed that in the past year 2013, the Rafah border crossing was closed for 101 days, while the number of its closure days reached 96 since June 30. Annual Statistics, issued by General Administration of crossings at the Ministry of Interior and National Security in Gaza, showed that the number of departures via the Rafah crossing in 2013 has only reached 152 thousand and 278 passengers, which is a small number compared to the year 2012, due the repeated closure of the crossing, especially during the second half of the year. Rafah crossing has been partially opened since the ďŹ rst of last July after the Egyptian military coup. Meanwhile, thousands of people have been trapped in the Gaza Strip because of the continued closure of the crossing, which has caused a real humanitarian catastrophe.
Source: PIC
Palestinian Cultural Organization Malaysia
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24th February, 2014
Issue No : 83
Articles & Analyses
The right of return is for individuals to decide, not for Abbas to concede By: Ibrahim Hewitt Yet again, we hear that President Mahmoud Abbas has more or less conceded the lawful right for Palestinian refugees to return to their homeland. Last year he told Israelis that although he would like to visit his birthplace in Safed, which is now in Israel, he did not expect to live there. Now he has told a group of Israelis visiting Ramallah that he has no wish to “drown the Jewish character” of Israel with returning refugees. This is an astonishing thing for him to say because its implications are so serious.
pendence be allowed to go back to their homes.” For the benefit of the Daily Telegraph’s Robert Tait, it should be remembered that the right to return is not a “Palestinian demand”, it is enshrined in UN General Assembly Resolution 194 dated 11 December 1948: “… refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbours should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date…” Israel’s membership of the UN was conditional inter alia on it implementing this resolution, something which, of course, it has never done.
For a start, let us make it clear that the right to return is an individual right so it is not within the Palestinian Authority leader’s power to concede it on behalf of anyone other than himself. It may be that he was well aware of that when he signalled his own reluctance to return to Safed but his latest statement is worrying for the millions of refugees festering in squalid UN-run camps around the region. Israel’s unilateral “Declaration of One journalist said that Ab- Independence” of 1948 is clear bas’s comments “seemed to that it was established as “the signal a significant concession Jewish State in Palestine”. Among on the so-called right of return other things, the founding docu- the Palestinian demand that ment insists that Israel “will loyseveral million descendants of ally uphold the principles of the 700,000 refugees expelled dur- United Nations Charter”, among ing Israel’s 1948 war of inde- which is a commitment to imple10 |
ment resolutions; Israel has ignored more UN resolutions than it has ever implemented. This “Jewish State” was recognised implicitly by the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) in 1993 when the former “terrorist” group came in from the cold and recognised Israel’s “right to exist”. That being the case, it must be asked why Benjamin Netanyahu is insisting on Palestinian recognition of the “Jewish character” of Israel as a pre-condition for a peace agreement. Experience shows that Israel is an expansionist state; it has never declared its borders and has grown exponentially ever since it was created. Indeed, even by then it had morphed itself from the “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine mentioned in the infamous Balfour Declaration of 1917 to
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Issue No : 83
Recognition of the “Jewish character” of Israel will give it the green light to complete the ethnic cleansing started in 1948, with the 20 per cent of non-Jewish Israeli citizens being “transferred” to the rump statelet of Palestine that may or may not come into being; ideally, from a Zionist perspective, the transfer won’t end there and life will be made so miserable for Palestinians in the West Bank that they will cross into what many Israelis already call the state of Palestine; the rest of us know this as the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. This is the “alternative homeland” scenario dreaded
by Palestinians who have no wish nature. Fear of being an obvious to leave their historic homeland. apartheid state with a democratic Israel will cite “security” con- façade is genuine; Jewish stucerns in order to get its way, dents in America are already bethough, and willing dupes like ing coached about how to defend US Secretary of State John Kerry, the case for declaring a Jewish ever-ready to do the pro-Israel state while basically disenfranLobby’s bidding, will put pres- chising 1-in-5 of Israel’s citizens sure on the Palestinian Authority and implementing a raft of disto concede even more than it has criminatory laws. already. This includes agreement to a strong Israeli military presence in the Jordan Valley, so that an “independent state of Pales-
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Jewish students in America are already being coached about how to defend the case for declaring a Jewish state while basically disenfranchising 1-in-5 of Israel’s citizens and implementing a raft of discriminatory laws.
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a “Jewish State” by 1948. The land it occupied by the 1949 armistice was greater in area than the allocation of the UN Partition Plan of 1947; this was increased yet again when Israel launched the Six-Day War in 1967 and occupied all of historic Palestine. While not occupying the Gaza Strip physically since 2005, Israel controls its borders, territorial waters and air space; it is an occupation legally and in all but name. As the “negotiations” (a euphemism for Palestinian concessions) drag on for 20 years and counting, Israel creates more facts on the ground, grabbing ever more land for its illegal settlements, settler-only roads, military zones and “nature reserves”. I think that it is fair to say that Israel’s leaders have no intention whatsoever of giving up any land upon which Jews are now living as they push to create “Eretz Israel”, the Greater Israel that is Zionism’s dream.
24th February, 2014
tine” will be nothing of the sort; it will have an army of occupation on its territory from Day One. Once Israel is cleared of the “demographic time-bomb” of its Palestinian citizens it can claim, with hand on heart, that it is indeed both Jewish and democratic in
Palestinian Cultural Organization Malaysia
That is why Mahmoud Abbas needs to wake from his stupor and understand that while he is free to give up his own right of return, he has no right whatsoever to concede that right for all Palestinian refugees. Israel and its Western backers will, of course, continue to ignore the UN resolutions in any case and so won’t mind that the legal niceties are chewed up and spat out as long as what Israel wants, Israel gets. But that will never produce a just and lasting peace in the region. Maybe that doesn’t bother the military-industrial complex upon which Israel is so reliant; it certainly won’t bother the neoconservatives running America. Their plans for the Middle East don’t include a state of Palestine; they want to see USIsraeli hegemony at any cost. More than anything else, Abbas’s ill-advised statements demonstrate the ridiculous nature of the whole peace process, which is producing neither peace nor much of a process at the moment. The one-state solution is being talked about in all sorts of circles these days, as more and more people realise and accept that two-states are a non-starter. If the message can get through to Mahmoud Abbas and his cronies in Ramallah on board the Palestinian Authority gravy train, maybe peace will have a chance after all. | 11
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24th February, 2014
Palestinian Cultural Organization Malaysia