Some observers have suggested that one of the reasons for the difference in the way the recent Israeli crackdown on the Palestinians was perceived in the U.S. this April and May as compared to past such episodes is that it took place in the wake of the killing of Mr. Floyd by police and subsequent protests. In the context of Black Lives Matter and the demand for an end to police brutality and an end to different treatment for minorities than for the white majority, Palestine looks different.

Most Americans have no idea that Israel is militarily occupying 5 million Palestinians, many of whose families it expelled from their homes in Israel proper in 1948. Some 70% of the Palestinians in Gaza were chased off their farms or out of their towns by militant Zionist militias in 1948. Hagana (the main Jewish paramilitary) even boasted that 75 percent of Palestinian flight was owing to its activities, in a document that was seen by Israeli historians in the Israeli archives, but then became unavailable. There had been over a million Palestinians in British Mandate Palestine. 720,000 of them were expelled by 500,000 European Jewish settlers allowed in by the British, who then erected Israel on 78% of the old Mandate.

But today’s problem is not a refugee problem. It is a problem stemming more from 1967, when Israel made an audacious grab for the Gaza Strip and the Palestinian West Bank. The civilian Palestinians who lived there had played no role in the 1967 Six Day War. They were not even areas awarded Israel in the toothless UN General Assembly partition plan of 1947. There had been no significant Jewish settlement of those areas in the first half of the twentieth century. It was pure land greed.

Although Israeli elites argued about what to do with the new territory, within five years the colonialists had won out and the government began backing Israeli colonies in Palestinian cities like al-Khalil (which the Israelis call Hebron). Israel invoked Ottoman-era laws on eminent domain to grab Palestinian farms and make them available as sites of apartment complexes for Israelis where no Palestinian is allowed. This colonization of Palestinian land violates the Fourth Geneva Convention on the treatment of occupied people and the UN Charter, which forbids a state to aggrandize itself with land seized violently from neighboring peoples. These international laws were enacted in a bid to stop a repeat of what Germany did to Poland in WW II, when it invaded and occupied Poland, expelled Poles and brought in ethnic Germans to take their place.

But today’s problem is not merely a colonialism problem, either. Palestinians are stateless. Israel will not allow them to have a state. They are not citizens of anything. They don’t have passports, just laissez-passer, which many governments won’t honor. They don’t have a right to their own property, because Israeli courts often back the Israeli state and Israeli squatters who steal that property. Palestinian courts cannot overrule such decisions. Palestinians are spied on. They are arbitrarily woken up in the middle of the night by Israeli military patrols. They are killed with impunity.

And here is the place where George Floyd and the Palestinians begin to meet. George Floyd was an American citizen. But his citizenship was not fully recognized by the Minneapolis police department. He was not treated like a citizen. A man’s knee was pressed down on his neck for over nine minutes, choking the life out of him. Among the general rights accorded to citizens by the state is access to oxygen. Mr. Floyd was not accorded that right. The death penalty was imposed on him for trying to pass a counterfeit $20 bill. His life was only worth $20.

Now, it is a general principle of U.S. law, affirmed by the Supreme Court in 1967, that Americans cannot be deprived of their citizenship. How that ruling was arrived at is very interesting in our context.

Congress had passed a 1940 Cold War law mandating that Americans lose their citizenship if they vote in the election of a foreign country.

This law was challenged in 1958 in Perez v. Brownell, but was upheld by a narrow 5-4 majority. In that case, Clemente Perez was a Texan of Mexican descent who moved to Mexico during WW II to avoid the draft, for which he never registered, and while there in the 1940s he voted in Mexican elections. His citizenship was revoked and SCOTUS agreed that the Department of Justice had acted properly.

Chief Justice Earl Warren dissented in this case. He wrote,

“To secure the inalienable rights of the individual, ‘Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.’ I do not believe the passage of time has lessened the truth of this proposition. It is basic to our form of government. This Government was born of its citizens, it maintains itself in a continuing relationship with them, and, in my judgment, it is without power to sever the relationship that gives rise to its existence. I cannot believe that a government conceived in the spirit of ours was established with power to take from the people their most basic right.

Citizenship is man’s basic right for it is nothing less than the right to have rights. Remove this priceless possession and there remains a stateless person, disgraced and degraded in the eyes of his countrymen. He has no lawful claim to protection from any nation, and no nation may assert rights on his behalf. His very existence is at the sufferance of the state within whose borders he happens to be. In this country the expatriate would presumably enjoy, at most, only the limited rights and privileges of aliens,5 and like the alien he might even be subject to deportation and thereby deprived of the right to assert any rights.6 This government was not established with power to decree this fate.”

Because of Warren’s dissent and the narrowness of the verdict, the 1940 law was tested again in 1967, in Afroyim v. Rusk.

Beys Afroyim was a Polish Jew who immigrated to the U.S. and got citizenship in 1926. In 1950, after the establishment of Israel, he moved there, and voted in the 1951 election for the Knesset or Israeli parliament. When he tried to renew his US passport, he was refused, and his U.S. citizenship was revoked by the State Department.

In Afroyim v. Rusk, the Supreme Court struck down the 1940 law and reversed Perez. Here is another place that George Floyd, the Israelis and the Palestinians come together. The main grounds on which the court argued in 1967 that an American’s citizenship cannot be taken away involuntarily was the 14th Amendment. That amendment established birthright citizenship and confirmed that African-American ex-slaves were U.S. citizens. (Slaves are not citizens, and so the legal status of the ex-slaves after Lincoln’s 1863 Emancipation Proclamation was brought into doubt in some quarters).

The court noted, the the first clause of the 14th Amendment is actually an amendment inserted by those senators fearful that attempts would be made to take citizenship away from African-Americans. It says, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

The court noted,

“Senator Howard, who sponsored the Amendment in the Senate, thus explained the purpose of the clause: ‘It settles the great question of citizenship and removes all doubt as to what persons are or are not citizens of the United States. * * * We desired to put this question of citizenship and the rights of citizens * * * under the civil rights bill beyond the legislative power * * *…. This undeniable purpose of the Fourteenth Amendment to make citizenship of Negroes permanent and secure would be frustrated by holding that the Government can rob a citizen of his citizenship without his consent by simply proceeding to act under an implied general power to regulate foreign affairs or some other power generally granted.”

So African-Americans could not be expatriated. And neither, the court decided, could Beys Efroyim, regardless of whether he voted in an Israeli election.

As Chief Justice Warren had said of citizenship, “Remove this priceless possession and there remains a stateless person, disgraced and degraded in the eyes of his countrymen. He has no lawful claim to protection from any nation, and no nation may assert rights on his behalf. His very existence is at the sufferance of the state within whose borders he happens to be.”

So Senator Howard was trying to protect African-Americans from meeting this fate, of statelessness.

But there are ways of making people second-class citizens without taking away their passports. And that is what has been done to many African-Americans. That is what was done to George Floyd.

So, yes, the Palestinians have this in common with George Floyd. Neither of them was treated as a citizen would be. Palestinians do not have the right to have rights, in Warren’s phrase. They are stateless, disgraced and degraded, with no lawful claim to protection from any nation. George Floyd was not stateless. He had a lawful claim to protection from the American nation de jure, in the law. But de facto, he was deprived of it.

—-

Bonus Video:

CBS News: “How the Black Lives Matter movement relates to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict”

“Most Palestinians living in East Jerusalem have long rejected the option of full Israeli citizenship, seeing it as a betrayal to their political cause – the formation of a Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital. But as that dream remains elusive, more and more Palestinians are applying for Israeli citizenship. Zlatica Hoke reports the decision is hard for many Palestinians who say they have to be pragmatic about it.”

VOA: “Growing Number of E. Jerusalem Palestinians Seek Israeli Citizenship”

BETHLEHEM (Ma’an) –Support for the two state solution decreased among both Palestinians and Israelis over the past year with just 51 percent of both populations vouching support, a recent poll reported.

Compared to June 2014, support for the two-state solution decreased among Israelis from 62 percent to 51 percent and among Palestinians from 54 percent to 51 percent, according to results from a poll conducted jointly by the Harry Truman Research Institute and the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research.

Meanwhile, perception by both groups of the other as an existential threat remained the same.

The poll reported that 56 percent of Palestinians believe that Israel’s long term goals are to extend its borders to cover the area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, expelling all Palestinian citizens.

Forty three percent of Israelis polled, meanwhile, think that Palestinian aspirations in the long run are to conquer and destroy much of the Jewish population in Israel.

The poll results come as the majority of the current Israeli government pieced together by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu publicly opposes the establishment of an independent continuous Palestinian state.

Palestinian leadership has historically said that continued expansion of settlements throughout occupied East Jerusalem and the West Bank have removed the option of a two-state solution championed in past peace negotiations.

Over 60 percent of the land area of occupied East Jerusalem and the West Bank is controlled by Israeli forces and is home to over half a million Israelis living in Jewish-only settlements deemed illegal under international law.

Despite this, Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas said in the lead up to Israeli elections in March that Palestinian leadership would embark on renewed negotiations with any Israeli government that supported the two-state solution.

Netanyahu unequivocally ruled out the possibility for an independent Palestinian state in the run up to the elections, in a statement he later back-peddled on following international criticism.

Via Ma’an News Agency

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Related video added by Juan Cole:

France24: “There will be no two-state solution’ to Israeli-Palestinian conflict”

Nasser Nawaj’ah held Laith’s hand as, beside me, they walked down the dirt and pebble path of Old Susya. Nasser is 33 years old, his son six. Nasser’s jaw was set and every few moments he glanced over his shoulder to see if anyone was approaching. Until Laith piped up with his question, the only sounds were our footsteps and the wind, against which Nasser was wearing a wool hat and a pleated brown jacket.

“Why did they take our home?” the little boy asked.

“Why did they take it? Good question,” replied Nasser, pausing to choose his words carefully. “They don’t want Palestinians. They don’t want us here.”

Laith was, in fact, asking about something that had happened 29 years ago when his father was a young boy. But he could just as well have been referring to the imminent threat of expulsion facing his family and his community today.

I had spent the previous night with Nasser and his family in their tent on their farmland in Khirbet Susya in the South Hebron Hills of the West Bank. Since 1986, they have have lived there, one-third of a mile from their old home, which is now an Israeli archeological park.  Perched on the hill above us is an Israeli settlement built on land occupied by Israel in 1967. That settlement, which is considered illegal under international law, was established in 1983 and is also called Susya. Where we now are, a few hundred meters away across the road, was once Old Susya, the former village of Nasser’s family.

I had mentioned to Nasser earlier that morning that I wanted to see Old Susya. As a foreigner, I could purchase a ticket to the archaeological site and enter without any problem. For Nasser, a Palestinian, it was a different story. He had tried twice to visit the site of the village and cave where he was born without much success, but decided to try again with me. This time he would bring along his six-year old son.

Nasser’s parents were born in El-Jaretain, a village in the Naqab desert in what is now Israel. They were pushed out of their home in 1948, during the mass displacement accompanying the founding of that country.  After their expulsion from El-Jaretain, they joined relatives who had lived for decades in the ancient caves of Old Susya. A Palestinian village had existed there since at least 1830, when it was first mentioned in written records.

Though his family’s origin is in El-Jaretain, Old Susya is home for Nasser.

“Our village resides in our memory, and I want it to be in our children’s memory, the memory of the children of Susya,” Nasser said, explaining why he decided to bring Laith with him today. “This is their village, their real village, from which they were expelled in 1986. They have to see it, feel it, remember it, know its features. This is our heritage.”

Nasser first attempted to return to Old Susya several years ago, accompanied by his father and an Israeli friend from the human rights organization B’Tselem for which Nasser works. The Israeli army kicked them out, but not before his father was able to show him the cisterns where he had watered his sheep and the cave in which Nasser had been born.  A few weeks before my visit, he tried a second time, buying tickets to the archaeological park and briefly getting in. Once again, he told me, Israeli soldiers wouldn’t let him stay. “They told us Palestinians were not allowed in, that this is a closed area, and kicked us out.”

Nasser fully expected to be ejected again, but for some reason, the soldiers stayed in their jeep at the entrance to the site and left us alone.

“Where is our home?” Laith asked as soon as we were inside.

“You want to see our home? Okay, I’ll show you,” Nasser replied, taking his young son by the hand and guiding him deeper into the village.

“Is this our house?” Laith asked again moments later with the persistence only a six-year-old can muster.

“We’re coming to it, hold on.”

Nasser pointed out the cistern from which their family used to draw water, now covered with iron bars and filled with pigeons.  Laith peered inside. “Are these pigeons ours?”

“No, pigeons belong to God.”

Nasser stopped walking and stood looking at one particular cave.

“Here?” Laith asked, tugging his father’s arm.

Nasser was silent for a moment before replying, “Here.”

He led his son down stone steps and through a rectangular entrance hewn from white and pink rock. “Here it is,” he said, pausing before entering the dark, damp underground structure. “This is our cave. My mother gave birth to me here.”

Laith wanted to know if water dripped from the ceiling back then as it does now, if the entrance had been open then, and if there had been electricity in the cave when Nasser was a child. But he had an even more pressing question, one he kept asking throughout the day: “Why did they take it from us, Daddy?”

Click here to view the video clip if it does not load for you.

Nasser Nawaj’ah takes his son back to Old Susya

Expelled for Life

Nasser was only four years old in June 1986 when, after the remains of an ancient synagogue were discovered in Old Susya, Israel’s Civil Administration — the military body through which it manages the Occupied Palestinian Territories — declared the village an archaeological site and expropriated it. Nasser doesn’t remember being driven out of the cave in which he was born, but his 70-year old mother, Um Jihad, recalls it vividly.

Each summer during the harvest, the villagers would travel to their agricultural lands to pick figs, olives, and grapes. At the end of the harvest, they would return to Old Susya. One summer, when they tried to go back, she remembers, they found that “the Israeli army had fenced off the village and locked us out.”  Bulldozers had blocked the caves and destroyed their homes.

Um Jihad was determined to retrieve her possessions. She approached the new gate just then being erected. Bedouin Arabs were working on it. “Ma’am, you better leave,” she remembers one of them warning her. “They are going to beat you up.”

Um Jihad knew who “they” meant. Israelis from the settlement of Susya, backed by the Israeli military, had already taken over the village.

“I will get my belongings even if they shoot me dead,” she replied and returned to her cave, wrapped her possessions in bundles, and carried them one by one back to the gate. By the time she had wrapped her last bundle, the gate was closed and locked and the Bedouin workers had left. She was trapped inside Old Susya with hostile settlers and soldiers. Undaunted, Um Jihad climbed atop a small hill next to the gate and tossed the bundles over one by one. Then she dug a hole beneath the fence and crawled out just as a soldier ran towards her, rifle in hand.

“I was young and fearless back then,” she said with a laugh. “Now, I scare easily.”

Along with many of the other 25 families from Old Susya, Um Jihad refused to abandon her land. Instead of moving to the nearby town of Yatta, they settled on their farming and grazing lands, building rough houses or shacks there or moving into caves on that land, and they continued to call their community Susya, or Khirbet Susya.

But Um Jihad’s problems and those of the rest of her community had only begun.  “From then on, we lived in constant suffering and harassment,” she told me. “That Susya settlement is the mother of all our troubles. They keep uprooting our trees. Once one of their bulldozers almost ran me over while flattening the land.”

She describes several violent incidents the villagers endured at the hands of the settlers. About 15 years ago, she tells me, her cousin Mahmoud, a father of 12, was shot and killed by settlers.

Nasser has been beaten up multiple times — by soldiers as well as settlers. Um Jihad recalls one such incident from 2001 after Yair Har-Sinai, an Israeli settler from the Susya settlement, was murdered by a Palestinian. Though Har-Sinai’s killer was not a resident of Khirbet Susya, many left the village in fear of the retaliation that was sure to come.  Um Jihad’s daughters, however, wanted to stay and the teenaged Nasser refused to leave his sisters.  “The settlers caught Nasser, kicked and punched him,” his mother said. “He was bleeding from the ears and nose. He was bedridden for two months.”

In another incident, Nasser (who was by then a well-known activist) was at the top of the hill near the Susya settlement when settlers started shouting “Nasser Nawaj’ah, we are going to slaughter you!” and shooting at him. “He rolled down all the way to the valley.  He rolled until he reached the olive groves and ran away,” Um Jihad told me.

In addition to settlers physically assaulting villagers, sabotaging their water cisterns, destroying their caves, cutting down their trees, and vandalizing their fields, Susya and associated illegal outposts (unauthorized Israeli settlements) have seized approximately 740 acres of the villagers’ land, preventing them from accessing it to graze their sheep. On top of this, the Israeli military has repeatedly attempted to expel the already displaced villagers from Old Susya from their present homes.

In 1990, soldiers loaded many of the villagers onto trucks, drove them 15 kilometers north of Khirbet Susya, and then dumped them on the side of the road by a landfill. They returned to their agricultural lands, however, and rebuilt.

In 2001, after the murder of Yair Har-Sinai, soldiers accompanied by settlers violently and without warning expelled the community. Trees were uprooted, livestock slaughtered, wells and caves destroyed, and villagers beaten and arrested. An interim decision by the Israeli High Court permitted the villagers to return, but Israel’s Civil Administration has routinely denied them permits to build homes or pens for their livestock, and they have not been able to repair their caves. When temporary structures are built, they are declared illegal and some are demolished.

Um Jihad’s voice took on an edge of defiance as she summarized her community’s plight: “They demolish and we rebuild.”

Click here to see a larger version

Khirbet Susya, 2012. Photo Credit: Anne Paq/Activestills.org

“If I Lose This, I Lose My Life As Well”

The residents of Khirbet Susya have not been alone in their struggle. For protection and as witnesses, Israeli activists from organizations like Ta’ayush, a grassroots movement challenging racism and inequality between Jews and Arabs, have accompanied the village’s shepherds when they graze their sheep close to Israeli settlements.  And Rabbis for Human Rights (RHR) has played a central role in the village’s legal battles since the 2001 expulsion.

The villagers’ situation deteriorated further in 2012 when the Susya settlement teamed up with the right-wing Israeli organization Regavim, which promotes an openly Zionist agenda to “protect national lands and properties,” and filed a petition with the High Court of Justice. The petition demanded the demolition of all structures in Khirbet Susya. Ironically, it described the village as an “illegal outpost” and a “security risk” to the Susya settlers. Incidents of violence and destruction against the Palestinian community soon intensified.

Late that year, the lawyers of RHR submitted a proposed master plan on behalf of Khirbet Susya to the Civil Administration. Its response, released in October 2013, read, in part: “We see the current plan as yet another attempt to keep a poor, downtrodden population from advancing… It is an attempt to prevent the Palestinian woman from breaking the cycle of poverty and depriving her of educational and professional opportunities. Similarly, by sentencing the Palestinian child to life in a small, stultified village with no means for development, the plan keeps the child from being aware of all the opportunities available to any other person. It is our recommendation that the plan be rejected out of hand.”  The Civil Administration recommended that the villagers move closer to the nearby town of Yatta.

Nasser was not fooled by such protestations of concern. The Civil Administration’s moves, he told me, have nothing to do with conditions not being good enough for the villagers. If that truly were their concern, then they would permit Khirbet Susya to develop. “This is the master plan for the Susya settlement: they need this land without Palestinians in order to expand the settlement.”

In February 2015, RHR petitioned the High Court of Justice, appealing the rejection of the village’s master plan and requesting that an interim injunction be issued to prevent further demolition until a ruling on the petition is made.  On May 5th, the Court refused to issue the injunction, giving the Israeli military the green light to proceed with demolition even while a ruling is still pending. Five days later, an inspector from the Civil Administration came to Khirbet Susya and took photographs and measurements of the village’s structures. Nasser and his family have every reason to believe that expulsion from their homes is imminent.

The villagers and their supporters quickly mobilized, organizing large demonstrations and erecting an international tent where solidarity activists from all over the world are keeping up a 24-hour presence. Nasser himself is determined to fight on. “This is my land. My mother gave birth to me in Susya. My father is a refugee from 1948, and I am a refugee from 1986. I don’t want my children to be refugees in 2015. This is my place. My life is here; the land, the olive trees, the grapes. If I lose this, I lose my life as well.”

Um Jihad agrees. “We suffered and lived our entire lives in Susya, from the day we left El-Jaretain to the day we arrived in Susya. Our sheep and land are in Susya, and we’re staying in our land to protect it. If we die, we’ll die steadfast in our land.”

Click here to see a larger version

Um Jihad sitting in her family’s tent in Khirbet Susya. Photo Credit: Nasser Nawaj’ah

Standing in his birth-cave, Nasser told Laith to hold still for a photo and then handed him the camera, so that the boy could record his heritage.

I asked Nasser how it felt to show his son the place of his birth.  “I feel something, but there are no words for it,” he replied.  He struggled for a moment to articulate his emotions, but broke off in mid-sentence, took Laith’s hand, and walked with him towards the cave’s exit. Father and son climbed the stairs out into the brightness of the cold winter day, where they would continue to explore Old Susya, before returning to their current home in Khirbet Susya — another home from which they may be expelled at any moment.

Jen Marlowe, a TomDispatch regular, is a communications associate for Just Vision, the founder of donkeysaddle projects, an award-winning author/documentary filmmaker, and a human rights/social justice activist. Her books include The Hour of Sunlight: One Palestinian’s Journey From Prisoner to Peacemaker and I Am Troy Davis. Her films include Witness Bahrain and One Family in Gaza. Twitter: @donkeysaddleorg. For information on how to support Susya, please visit Susiya Forever.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Book, Nick Turse’s Tomorrow’s Battlefield: U.S. Proxy Wars and Secret Ops in Africa, and Tom Engelhardt’s latest book, Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.

Copyright 2015 Jen Marlowe

Via Tomdispatch.com

——-

Related video added by Juan Cole:

AFP: “Funeral of a Palestinian killed in clash with Israel forces”

Stephane Richard, the CEO of the French telecommunnications company Orange embroiled himself in an international incident on Wednesday during a visit to Cairo, when he said that his company would withdraw its logo from the Israeli market “tomorrow” if he could. The reason is that the Israeli firm Partner, to which Orange licensed its brand name, has built 100 telecommunication antennas on confiscated Palestinian land. Partner telecom has about 28% of the Israeli market. Richard did also say that he understood that the investment in the settlements was also an issue in the Arab world, into which Orange wants to expand further.

The issue is not boycotting Israel proper. Richard would have had no problem with doing business with a Tel Aviv firm that had no West Bank presence. The issue is profiting from a vast project of illegal theft of an occupied people’s property. But the controversy signals something I predicted: As mainstream Israeli companies become more and more intertwined with West Bank settler investments and partners, all Israeli businesses risk getting caught up in BDS (the campaign to boycott, sanction and divest from Israeli firms implicated in the settlements). A similar dilemma hurt the Sodastream company, which suffered economic reversals after it advertised at this year’s Superbowl, drawing attention to itself. Many American consumers were disturbed to discover that one of the company’s factories was in the West Bank (it has since been closed), and they launched a boycott campaign against it.

Since the French foreign ministry (like those of the UK, the Netherlands and other European countries) has advised the country’s corporations not to partner with Israeli firms doing business in Israeli squatter settlements on the Palestinian West Bank, critics had argued that Orange is contravening French policy.

The reason for the foreign ministry warning is that European firms making money from the illegal Israeli squatter settlements on the Palestinian West Bank could theoretically be sued in European courts under the Rome Statute and under a 2004 finding of the International Criminal Court that the squatter settlements contravene international law. Orange’s Richard is eager to avoid such a lawsuit now that Partner has dragged the company’s brand into the settlement controversy.

Richard’s comment was vehemently denounced by Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu.

In 1998, when Orange was owned by the Chinese corporation Hutchison, it did a deal to lend its brand to the Israeli firm “Partner,” a cell phone company. Two years later, Orange was acquired by France Telecom, which is partially government-owned. Orange doesn’t actually have any operations of its own in Israel and owns nothing there, it just allows Partner to display its brand. Presumably Israeli cell phone subscribers are more impressed by a global brand like Orange than they would be by “Support,” which actually provides their communications. A controlling interest in Partner telecom was bought by billionaire Haim Saban last December.

Richard is therefore between Scylla and Charybdis. If he broke the brand licensing agreement with Partner before it ran out, he could be sued for breach of contract. But if he continues to make money from Partner as it expands into the settlements, he could be sued in Europe for profiting from illegal squatting and expropriation. He said, according to The Guardian, “If you take those amounts on one side and on the other side the time that we spend to explain this, to try to find a solution and the consequences that we have to manage here but also in France, believe me it’s a very bad deal. . .”

In short, Richard’s comment has nothing to do with “boycotting the Israeli state,” contrary to what Netanyahu maintained. It is about the squatter settlements and their illegality. It is about profiting from an epochal crime.

I wrote last winter regarding the Sodastream controversy:

“The European Union has decided to use its economic clout to push back against the clear Israeli determination to annex the whole West Bank while keeping its indigenous Palestinian population stateless and without the rights of citizenship.

The European Union has insisted that Israeli institutions and companies based in the Palestinian West Bank be excluded from any Israeli participation in a program of the European Union. (The EU treats Israel like a member, offering it many perquisites, opportunities for technology interchange, and access to EU markets; Brussels is saying, however, that none of that largesse can go to Israelis in the Occupied Weat Bank.)

About a third of Israel’s trade is with Europe (the US and China are its biggest trading partners, and Turkey comes after the EU). The EU imports $300 million a year from the settlements, but is clearly moving toward cutting that trade off.

Norway’s enormous sovereign wealth investment fund has just blacklisted Israeli firms with settlement ties.

This follows on a Netherlands’ investment fund divesting from five Israeli banks that fund squatter settlements on Palestinian territory.

European governments are increasingly warning their companies not to invest in or do business with Israeli firms in the Palestinian West Bank, since they might well be sued in Europe by the Palestinians so harmed. The recognition by the UN General Assembly of Palestine as a non-member observer state (on the same footing at the UN as the Vatican) has given Palestine more standing, even in national courts. Palestine is increasingly being upgraded diplomatically in Europe. The issue is also affected by European Union human rights law and a halo effect from the enactment of the Rome Statute in 2002 and the establishment of the International Criminal Court.

Here’s the problem for Jews in Europe and the United States who, like Ms. Johansson, do business with Israeli companies: It is increasingly difficult to distinguish between West Bank firms and Israeli ones. As the Israeli annexation of the West Bank accelerates, the hundreds of thousands of Israelis there bring along with them banks, factories and other economic activities from the metropole. Sodastream isn’t primarily a West Bank company, but it has a West Bank factory and so is embroiled in controversy.

That is, the growing international movement to divest, boycott and sanction the squatter institutions on the Palestinian West Bank is unlikely only to affect the latter over time. There is increasing danger of Israel proper being subjected to boycott because it is so tightly intertwined with the settlers.”

—-

Related video added by Juan Cole:

Wochit News: “Orange’s Pullout From Israel Gives Lift to Boycott”

Local activist Ahmad al-Halayqa told Ma’an that about 80 acres of land planted with olive saplings had been vandalized by Jewish settlers from nearby illegal settlements and outposts.

This is the fourth time settlers have vandalized and uprooted olive saplings in the area, he added.

The land, according to al-Halayqa, belongs to Muhammad Au Shanab al-Ayayda, Abd al-Qadir Abu Shanab al-Ayayda and Mousa Abu Shanab al-Ayayda. The saplings had recently been replanted for the fourth time.

Since 1967, approximately 800,000 olive trees have been uprooted by Israeli forces and settlers in the occupied West Bank, according to a joint report by the Palestinian Authority and the Applied Research Institute Jerusalem.

Via Ma’an News Agency

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Related video added by Juan Cole:

PressTV reported on a similar incident a couple of months ago near Ramallah

Talking to the London-based Asharq al-Awsat newspaper, President Obama said that he would never give up hope for “peace between Israelis and Palestinians.”

“Palestinians deserve an end to the occupation and the daily indignities that come with it. That’s why we’ve worked so hard over the years for a two-state solution and to develop innovative ways to address Israel’s security and Palestinian sovereignty needs,” he told Asharq al-Aswat.

The US president said that all parties must address the impact of last summer’s military offensive in Gaza and reconnect the coastal territory with the occupied West Bank, in addition to the solving “humanitarian and reconstruction” needs of the territory.

Obama’s remarks come just days after former EU officials urged the regional body to take action in response to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s construction of a new coalition government.

The letter published Sunday reiterated a statement made in April 2014 that the officials now regarded the Oslo-Madrid peace processes as “defunct.”

It added: “We are convinced in our own minds that he (Netanyahu) has little intention of negotiating seriously for a two-state solution within the term of this incoming Israeli government.”

In the lead up to March’s Knesset elections in Israel, Netanyahu publicly announced there would be no creation of a Palestinian state if he was reelected, while repeatedly vowing to expand settlement activity throughout occupied East Jerusalem and the West Bank.

The EU and US criticism come even before Netanyahu’s new coalition has officially assumed power. Included in the coalition is newly appointed Education Minister Naftali Bennett, who is stuanchly pro-settlement expansion in the occupied West Bank, while Netanyahu’s new Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked was accused of calling for the mass killing of Palestinians during the Israeli offensive on Gaza last summer.

The letter by former EU officials added that, “We… have low confidence that the US Government will be in a position to take a lead on fresh negotiations with the vigor and the impartiality that a two-state outcome demands.”

Via Ma’an News Agency

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Times of India: “Obama Sees ‘Difficult Path’ On Israel-Palestinian Conflict”

“In France, former Israeli President Shimon Peres said that a Palestinian State is necessary in order to have a democratic Jewish state. This statement came the same day that the United States and Israel dismissed the Palestine peace plan that was submitted by Jordan to the UN. teleSUR

TeleSur English: “Peres: Palestinian state necessary in order for a democratic Israel”

“Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman proposed on Friday that Arab citizens of Israel be offered financial incentives to leave the country and relocate to a future Palestinian state. Lieberman, whose ultra-nationalist party is a core part of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition, has previously spoken about redrawing borders but not about using sweeteners to encourage Arabs to uproot to a Palestinian state {NB: Lieberman opposes the establishment of a Palestinian state”}. Lieberman, one of the most strident voices in favor of the separation of Jews and Arabs, said Palestinians living in Jaffa and Acre, two mixed cities on the Mediterranean coast far from the West Bank, should be encouraged to move if they want.”

For more see: Reuters

Wotchit: “Offer Israeli Arabs Money to Move to Palestinian State: Lieberman”