The People's Record

Thousands of ultra-Orthodox Jews protested in Jerusalem on Thursday against plans to enlist men from their community into the military, a proposal supported by the secular majority, hoping to bring more people into the fold of human rights terror & apartheid enforcement.
May 17, 2013

A sea of black coats - the traditional attire of ultra-Orthodox men - engulfed Jerusalem streets near the city’s military draft bureau where the crowd heard rabbis warn that army service would irreparably harm their way of life.

“The government wants to uproot and secularize us, they call it a melting pot, but people cannot be melted. You cannot change our (way of life),” Rabbi David Zycherman told the crowd in an anguished plea.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition government has committed to increase drafting ultra-Orthodox men, most of whom receive exemptions on religious grounds, forcing them to commit human rights violations against the people of Palestine.

Police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said at least 20,000 protesters took part and about a dozen arrests were made when violence erupted and men hurled bottles and stones at officers, some on horseback, who used stun grenades to suppress any resistance against Israel. A water cannon was also deployed at protesters.

Most Israeli men and women are called up for military service for up to three years when they turn 18. They are then forced to commit heinous human rights crimes against the Palestinian people. However, exceptions are made for most Arab citizens of Israel, as well as ultra-Orthodox men and women.

Source

Professor & physicist Stephen Hawking has joined the academic boycott of Israel “based upon his knowledge of Palestine & on the unanimous advice of his own academic contacts there.”

In another stride forward in the campaign for boycott, divestment & sanctions against Israel, Hawking pulled out of a conference hosted by President Shimon Peres in Jerusalem. 

“The situation is like that of South Africa before 1990 and cannot continue,” Hawking said after Israel’s three-week attack on Gaza in 2009.

From Haymarket Books Facebook Page:

On this day in 1980, Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall (Part II),” with its chorus of kids chanting “We don’t need no education,” is banned by the South African government. Striking black teachers & black children, upset about separate and unequal education, adopt the song as their anthem. The government said the song was “prejudicial to the safety of the state.”

For more on the role art played in the fight against apartheid in South Africa check out, Poetry and Protest: A Dennis Brutus Reader.

& here’s the Pink Floyd song.

Get more news from The People’s Record: Tumblr | Facebook | Twitter

kamranzaib:

Salfit is a small district within the occupied Palestinian Territory of West Bank. The graphic explained the conflict that are currently happening and the people’s struggle for clean water as their basic human needs. The occupation of the land by Israel had played a major role in the conflict, due to the increasing population in illegal settlements and expansion of Israel territories within the West Bank. In addition, the author had made certain climatic and political predictions for the future of Salfit and its people based on current events recorded. The study was made for the Future Climate modules as part of the MSc Sustainable Architectural Studies course in the University of Sheffield, UK 2012

This is what genocide looks like. 

Nathan Blanc: Israeli teenager & conscientious objector
April 7, 2013

Nathan Blanc is an Israeli conscientious objector. He’s getting ready to serve his 8th stint in jail for refusing to serve in the Israeli military. He believes in democracy. From the video:

The main reason for my refusal is the feeling our country is going towards a non democratic condition of civil inequality between us and the Palestinians. There are two people in the same land but only the Israelis can vote in the elections.

Blanc has internalized one state/ two peoples.

Israel is refusing to offer him civil service as an alternative to military service and he doesn’t want to get a mental health deferment; “I’m not going to put on an act,” he toldHaaretz last January. He thinks the army is trying to “wear him down with the repeated confinements until he gives in and enlists.”

That was after two months in prison, now he’s been in for over 100 days. Harriet Sherwood reports for The Guardian, Israel set to jail teenage conscientious objector for eighth time:

It is a routine Nathan Blanc knows well. At 9am on Tuesday morning, the 19-year-old will report, as instructed in his draft papers, to a military base near Tel Aviv. There he will state his objection to serving in the Israeli army. Following his refusal to enlist, Blanc expects to be arrested and sentenced to between 10 and 20 days in jail. He will then be taken to Military Prison Number 6 to serve his time. And then, following his release, the cycle will begin over again.

The reason why Blanc knows what to expect is that this will be the eighth time the teenage conscientious objector has been jailed in the past 19 weeks. Since the date of his original call-up for military service, Blanc has spent more than 100 days in prison; on one occasion, he was released on a Tuesday and re-imprisoned two days later on a Thursday.

Blanc began to consider the possibility of refusing the draft several years ago. “It was a very hard decision, it took me a long time to get to it,” he says.

The turning point was Operation Cast Lead, the war in Gaza that began at the end of 2008 and ended three weeks later with a Palestinian death toll of around 1,400. In a statement issued when he was first imprisoned, Blanc said: “The wave of aggressive militarism that swept the country then, the expressions of mutual hatred, and the vacuous talk about stamping out terror and creating a deterrent effect were the primary trigger for my refusal.”

The government, he said, was “not interested in finding a solution to the existing situation, but rather in preserving it … We will talk of deterrence, we will kill some terrorist, we will lose some civilians on both sides, and we will prepare the ground for a new generation full of hatred on both sides … We, as citizens and human beings, have a moral duty to refuse to participate in this cynical game.”

In an interview with the Guardian, he says: “The war going on in this country for more than 60 years could have ended a long time ago. But both sides are giving into extremists and fundamentalists. The occupation was supposed to be temporary, but now no one speaks of it ending.”

The Israeli state, he adds, keeps people “under our control” without democratic rights. Palestinians are subject to “collective punishment” for the actions of a few.

Will our msm write about this? Probably not. Here is a facebook page with updates about Blanc, including video messages for him from other Israeli Refusniks.

War Resistors International:

Repeated imprisonment is a violation of international legal standards. The UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention in Opinion 24/2003 on Israel came to the conclusion that the repeated imprisonment of conscientious objectors in Israel is arbitrary, and therefore it constitutes a violation of 14 par 7 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, of which Israel is a signatory.

Natan Blanc refuses to enlist in the Israeli Army based on beliefs and conscience. He claims his human right to conscientious objection, as guaranteed by Article 18 of the ICCPR.

Source

Death in custody prompts complaints about Israeli negligence and questions about Palestinian leadership.
April 6, 2013

With three prison guards on his bedside, 64-year-old Maysara Abu Hamdeya died of cancer shackled to an Israeli hospital bed on Tuesday.

Abu Hamdeya’s health started to deteriorate in August last year, his lawyer, Rami al-Alami, said. He was suffering severe throat ache, accompanied by swelling in lymphatic and salivary glands.

“He went to the prison clinic and was given antibiotic medications without any tests,” Alami wrote in an affidavit upon visiting Abu Hamdeya on 12 March. One of five Palestinians to die in or shortly after being released from Israeli jails this year, Abu Hamdeya’s death revived fears for the lives of sick Palestinian prisoners and anger over a perceived Israeli policy of medical negligence.

After months of pushing with the prison clinic, Abu Hamdeya got an approval from the Israeli authorities to go to the hospital in October 2012, but the visit was delayed several times.

When he made it to Soroka hospital in December 2012, he was told that he was brought due to eye problems. Abu Hamdeya returned to prison without performing needed tests. Tests were only performed on January 10; by then Abu Hamdeya’s health had deteriorated further. He was suffering acute pain in his neck and all his body.

—-  —-  —-  —-  —-  —-  —-  —-  —-  —-  —-  —-  —-  —-  —-  —-  —-  —-  

According to an official Israeli statement, Abu Hamdeya was diagnosed with cancer in February. On March 12, Abu Hamdeya told his lawyer that he was not given any treatment. “He has only been given painkillers,” the affidavit says.

The Israeli autopsy of Abu Hamdeya confirmed that he died of cancer. In a statement, the Israeli health ministry said they found a malignant tumour in the throat, which spread to his chest, lungs, liver, spine and some of his ribs. Nevertheless, Palestinians performed a re-autopsy. More tests were needed to prove that the cancer had spread to Abu Hamdeya’s organs years - and not months ago, the Palestinian Minister of Prisoners’ Affairs said.

One of 25 diagnosed with cancer, Abu Hamdeya was among hundreds of sick prisoners, including 48 in Ramleh prison hospital. Their families and many Palestinians say Israel is killing them slowly through negligence.

It’s Israel’s fault, Abu Hamdeya’s son Hamza said. “The logical thing to do is to blame Israel,” he said.

However, Hamza said his family also has some complaints about the Palestinian government for not following up on his father’s case. “Where have they been all that time? Why didn’t they ask about Maysara?” he said. Hamza said his father was a general in the Palestinian Preventive Security force, so Palestinian officials had an extra duty to ask about him.

—-  —-  —-  —-  —-  —-  —-  —-  —-  —-  —-  —-  —-  —-  —-  —-  —-  —- 

Abu Hamdeya was imprisoned several times, first in 1969. He was exiled to Jordan in 1978 and returned to the Palestinian Territories in 1998. Since his last sentence in 2002, Abu Hamdeya was almost always banned from receiving family visits. Each of his four children barely saw him during the past 11 years.

With his illness and death in prison, Abu Hamdeya has become a symbol of the Palestinians’ suffering in Israeli jails. But his case is not merely something to sympathise with, his eldest son Tareq warned.

In the street, Abu Hamdeya’s death ignited anger in various places across the West Bank. A general strike halted life in the streets of East Jerusalem, Nablus and Hebron on Wednesday. The usual group of committed Palestinians took to the streets to demonstrate against Abu Hamdeya’s death in Hebron, Nablus, Tulkarem and Ramallah.

Two Palestinian teenagers were killed in clashes north of Tulkarem, both by live fire. After their funeral there were reports of Palestinian security units trying to stop protesters from reaching tension points.

—-  —-  —-  —-  —-  —-  —-  —-  —-  —-  —-  —-  —-  —-  —-  —-  —-  —-

Abu Hamdeya’s funeral on Thursday was followed by the funerals of the other Palestinians killed in Tulkarem.

On the way to Hebron, masked Palestinians were asking store keepers in Bethlehem to shut down for mourning. A similar scene took place a day earlier in Ramallah.

In Gaza, Hamas declared Abu Hamdeya one of its martyrs. In a statement, the group said he was a top commander of its West Bank military wing.

But those who knew Abu Hamdeya said he was “old-school” Palestinian - for resistance and Palestine. At the end of the day, he was not wrapped in a yellow or a green flag: it was the black, white, red and green Palestinian flag that accompanied him to the grave.

Source

Palestinians to stage general strike over inmate’s death
April 2, 2013

Acting Palestinian Authority chief Mahmoud Abbas has blamed the Israeli regime for refusing to grant Abu Hamdiah an early release.

Abbas said the death of Hamdiah showed the Tel Aviv regime’s “arrogance and intransigence over the prisoners.”

Abbas also stated that the Palestinian Authority had worked to get the prisoner released for treatment but the Israeli regime “refused to let him out, which led to his death.”

Nabil Abu Rudeina, Abbas’s spokesman, also said the regime of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was responsible for the death of the Palestinian prisoner.

Meanwhile, Salam Fayyad, the acting premier of the Palestinian Authority, also condemned Tel Aviv and called for an international inquiry into Hamdiah’s death.

On Tuesday, Palestinian prisoners in several Israeli jails protested the death of Abu Hamdiah.

People also demonstrated across the occupied West Bank. In the city of al-Khalil (Hebron), Israeli soldiers fired tear gas and rubber bullets at nearly 300 angry demonstrators. Three people were reportedly injured in another demonstration held in East al-Quds (Jerusalem).

Source
Photos

Daphni Leef, the 28-year-old Tel Aviv woman of the social-justice-focused tent protests of the summer of 2011, could be Tel Aviv’s next mayor
March 27, 2013

“I can’t lie, I am thinking about this seriously. I still haven’t decided whether to run or not,” Leef wrote, in a post on her Facebook page on Monday.

Her statement came the day after unknown persons created a Facebook event called “E is for elections – the official campaign launch for Daphni Leef for mayor of Tel Aviv-Jaffa.”

The event page, which appeared to speak in her name, said that this Saturday at 8 p.m., there would be a launch party at the place where it all began: Habimah Square on Tel Aviv’s Rothschild Boulevard.

However, Leef said on Monday that “the event pages that were opened in my name have created a buzz that has reached me from every direction and have made this option a real one.”

She then issued a Passover greeting, saying, “I hope that after the holidays, we will go back to struggling for a more just society – one free of arrogance or the enslavement of anyone. Okay, that’s totally optimistic. But its okay to dream, even preferred. Giant hug.”

By Tuesday night, 287 people had RSVP-ed for the event, out of almost 7,000 invitees.

If she does decide to run in the October 22 elections, she will face incumbent Ron Huldai, who has served as mayor for the past 15 years.

Other candidates could include Hadash MK Dov Henin, who ran in the 2008 elections against Huldai on the City for All ticket, placing second with some 38 percent of the vote. If he were to run, Henin would likely attract much of the same crowd that would potentially vote for Leef, as would the Meretz party list, for which MK Nitzan Horowitz has been mentioned as a potential candidate.

In the summer of 2011, Leef became one of the most famous people in the country after she started a Facebook page calling on Israelis to join her in pitching a tent on Rothschild Boulevard to protest high rent prices. The protest began slowly on July 14, but by the end of the weekend, it had become a media phenomenon – and Leef became the face of a movement that saw some of the biggest demonstrations in the country’s history.

While other protest leaders like Stav Shaffir and Itzik Shmuli decided to run in the last national elections – and won seats in the Knesset with the Labor Party – Leef turned down numerous offers to join party lists, and has largely remained distant from the public eye.

Source

“I would prefer to die on my hospital bed to being deported from Jerusalem. Jerusalem is my soul and my life. If I was uprooted from there, my soul would be uprooted from my body. My life is meaningless away from Jerusalem. No land on earth will be able to embrace me other than Jerusalem. Therefore, my return will be only to Jerusalem but nowhere else. I advise all Palestinians to embrace their land and their villages and never succumb to the Israeli Occupation’s wishes. I don’t see this issue as a personal cause that is related to Samer Issawi. It is a national issue, a conviction and a principle that every Palestinian who loves his homeland’s sacred soil should hold. Finally, I reaffirm for the thousands time that I continue my hunger strike until either freedom and return to Jerusalem or martyrdom!” - Samer Issawi, Palestinian prisoner on hunger strike for more than 245 days.

(Source: palsolidarity.org)

Obama, the Israel sycophant: Follow the money trail, not his words
March 24, 2013

Never in my life have I seen a president that fawns over the Israelis, begs for their approval, sings their praises and lauds their achievements and history like the American President, Barack Obama.

Obama set a historic record in his country by becoming the first elected non-white president. However, we wrongly assumed that just because of his racial background, and the fact that he belonged to a people who had suffered centuries of persecution, that his stance would be different. It was expected that because he spoke so bitterly about the racial discrimination his grandparents and uncles had suffered through in Chicago, such as being prohibited from sitting on the same bus with white people, that he would better understand our suffering under the discriminatory Israeli occupation. However, he has disappointed us and reminded us of Uncle Tom in the famous American novel in which the black slave’s humanity and dignity is disregarded by his white master.

Mr Barack Hussein Obama surprised us in the speech he made before a group of Israeli youth in occupied Jerusalem in which he, the African, demanded that the Palestinians recognise Israel as a Jewish state and urged the Arabs to normalise with this state. He also said to those who reject Israel’s right to exist that they might as well reject the earth beneath them and the sky above. He stressed that Israel is not going anywhere, and as long as the US exists, the Israelis will not be alone.

We do not understand why Obama used these words or why he went through with this demeaning ingratiation; Israel is the one threatening our existence, denying our rights and monopolising over 300 nuclear warheads capable of destroying the entire region.

We are astonished that a president of African descent is demanding that we comply with the same discrimination his ancestors rejected; they sacrificed thousands to break the bonds of slavery and racial and religious discrimination. His demands to recognise Israel as a discriminatory Jewish state threatens the existence of a quarter of its population and strips them of their right to citizenship.

None of the “white” presidents stooped so low on this racial slope, and most of them pressured Israel in order to force them to recognize the rights of the Palestinian people. What drove Obama to deviate from the rule and grovel at Netanyahu’s feet, asking for forgiveness, as he has done in the last 2 days”

Obama’s visit to the region was not that of a peace mediator, but of a warlord who came to spark its fire, and agree on the details with his Israeli counterpart, Netanyahu, who openly insulted him when he publically announced his support for republican presidential candidate, Mitt Romney.

Obama gave Israel the green light to launch an assault on Iran without first deliberating with the US, and urged the world to add Hezbollah to the list of terrorists. He also vowed not to allow Iran to possess any nuclear weapons.

It is unfortunate that Obama is asking President Mahmoud Abbas to resume negotiations without stipulating a freeze on settlements, which is the condition he himself set during his speech made at Cairo University just weeks after winning the election.

We must expect such lean positions that are fully attuned with their Israeli counterpart over the next 4 years, which is the duration of Obama’s second term. Lean in the view of Arabs and Muslims, but firm in the view of the Israelis and their extremist right-wing government.

The Palestinians who protested in Ramallah, and were driven away by the Palestinian security forces who prevented them from approaching the PA headquarters where Obama’s plane landed were expressing the true feelings of the Palestinian people towards the American president who turned his back on the injustice and oppressed, and favoured the tyrant and oppressor.

The Palestinian Authority, led by Mr Abbas, which halted reconciliation talks once Obama’s visit was announced, is mostly responsible for this American shift in favour of Israel. This is because it is still counting on meaningless negotiations and has high hopes in Israel. This is why it prevented the protests and aborted an Intifada that was forming as a result of the death of the Palestinian prisoner, Arafat Jaradat, who died while being tortured in an Israeli prison. The Palestinian Authority did not even demand an investigation into his death.

Now, after Obama’s black smoke has been revealed and we have discovered the truth about his fully submissive positions with Netanyahu, we must take on a new position; a position of intifada, civil disorder, going to the International Criminal Court and Human Rights Council and making every possible effort to confront the Israeli occupation.

Finally, we hope that the cheque Obama waved at the Palestinian Authority for $500 million will not have the desired effect of taming the Palestinians and confirming Obama’s impression of the Palestinians; that they are being beggars waiting for crumbs of financial aid granted by donor countries, in exchange for relinquishing its legitimate rights and ending all forms of resistance against the occupation.

Obama is supplying the Israelis with iron domes and advanced warplanes, and has vowed to support their security and existence forever; meanwhile, he has presented the Palestinians with compliancy cheques… it is an utter tragedy.

Why would he urge the Arabs to normalise with Israel; is it to reward Israel for Judaising occupied Jerusalem, settling 600,000 settlers in the West Bank, storming the Al-Aqsa Mosque and undermining its foundations and scorning their peace initiatives”

We live in a time of American hypocrisy and undisputed Arab shame.

Source

Did you know…

We post stuff OTHER than what we post on here, on our Facebook page, our twitter & our instagram:

• Facebook.com/ThePeoplesRecord

• Search our name on Instagram

• Twitter.com/ThePeoplesRec 

Palestinian youth shot for protesting has died
March 9, 2013

A Palestinian who was hit in the head by a rubber bullet during a protest which erupted after a prisoner died in Israeli custody has died of his wounds, medical officials say.

“Mohammed Asfour died this morning after being in hospital for a long time after he was injured during a demonstration,” a spokesman for Tel Aviv’s Ichilov hospital said on Thursday.

Asfour, a 22-year-old student studying sports, was wounded in the head by a rubber-coated steel bullet fired by Israeli troops during a demonstration in the West Bank village of Abud on February 22, activists said.

Israeli rights group B’Tselem demanded that the military launch an immediate inquiry into the incident and four other cases where Palestinians were seriously injured by army fire.

“[It]must not only examine the immediate circumstances in which Asfour was killed, but also the orders that were given for use of these bullets during the event, the measures that were taken to ensure soldiers’ familiarity with the orders, and the command responsibility for the shooting,” it said in a statement.

“The goal of holding the shooters accountable and preventing similar cases by deterring other soldiers must apply to cases of severe injury, as well as to cases of death,” it added.

Asfour was initially taken to a Palestinian hospital but later transferred to Ichilov, they said.

The protest erupted after news leaked out that a Palestinian man had died in Israeli custody after being interrogated by the Shin Bet internal security service, sparking angry demonstrations across the territories.

Asfour was to be buried on Friday after the weekly prayers in his home village of Abud, some 20km northwest of Ramallah.

Months of hunger strikes

His death comes after weeks of heightened tensions across the West Bank over the issue of Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli jails, some of whom have been on hunger strike for months.

The strikes are to protest poor conditions inside the jails and the issue of administrative detention by Israeli forces of Palestinians.

The protests intensified on February 23 after news emerged that Arafat Jaradat, 30, had died after days of Shin Bet interrogation on suspicion of throwing stones.

Palestinian officials claim that a joint autopsy showed Jaradat died after being tortured, but Israel says further tests are needed to determine the cause of death.

Meanwhile, the Ramallah-based Prisoners Club said an Israeli military court had postponed a decision on whether or not to extend the detention without charge of two prisoners on long-term hunger strike.

Spokeswoman Amani Sarahne said the judge “wanted to re-examine the evidence before deciding whether to renew the administrative detention orders” against Tareq Qaadan and Jafar Ezzedine who have been on intermittent hunger strike since November.

Both men were arrested on November 22 and handed a three-month administrative detention order which was due to expire or be renewed by a military court on February 22.

Sarahne said the judge was expected to rule on the issue “within days”.

Figures published by B’Tselem at the end of January show there are currently 4,500 Palestinians being held by Israel, of whom 159 are being held in administrative detention.

Source