While the Occupation is business as usual for Israel, there should be no business with Israel

In Occupied Palestine

Zionism in practice

Israel’s Daily Toll on Palestinian Life, Limb, Liberty and Property

48 hours to 8am 24 July 2010

Main source of statistics: Palestinian Monitoring Group (PMG).

Israeli soldiers beat up women and children – 3-year-old child hospitalised

Ethnic cleansing: population transfer orders on West Bank villagers

Rafah district: homes and farms under fire – crops bulldozed

Israeli Occupation forces shoot their way round the city of Nablus

Occupation settlers set fire to Palestinian olive trees

Israeli soldiers abduct 15-year-old boy

 Farmers driven off their land by Occupation settlers and Israeli Army

Zionist fanatics attack Palestinian burial

Non-violent protesters suffer injury and tear gas suffocation

Night peace disruption in 12 towns and villages

3 attacks – 28 raids including home invasions – numerous beatings – numerous injuries

5 taken prisoner – 31 detained – 84 restrictions of movement

July 23 & 24

Home invasions & occupations: evening, the town of Anata - 18:40, Hebron - 15:20, the town of Sa’ - 01:45, the town of Jayus - 00:40, the town of Biddya - 00:45, the town of Deir Istiya.

Peace disruption raids: 13:00, the town of Biddu - 01:50, the town of Al Mazra’a al Gharbiya - 02:40, the town of Bir Zeit - 02:40, the village of Abu Qash - 15:00, Tulkarem - 17:00, the town of Baqa ash Sharqiya - 17:00, the town of Attil - 11:00, Qalqilya - 20:40, the village of Far’ata - 02:30, the village of Talluza - 02:00-04:30, Salfit - 12:00, the town of Al Ubeidiya - 12:00, the village of Dar Salah - 09:00, the town of Dura - 10:00, Hebron - 14:35, Hebron - 19:00, the town of Surif - 03:00, the town of Beit Ummar - 01:25-06:00, Nablus - 00:20, the town of Tuqu - 10:55, the town of Dura - 00:20, the town of Adh Dhahiriya.

July 23

Palestinian attacks: none

Israeli attack: Nablus – 01:25-06:00, the Israeli Army invaded and shot its way indiscriminately round the city.

Occupation settler violence – arson – agricultural sabotage: Ramallah – Zionist militants set fire to olive trees on land belonging to the village of Saffa.

Occupation settler and Israeli Army violence – agricultural sabotage: Nablus – 09:30, a mob from the settlement of Itamar assaulted farmers as they were working on their land near the settlement. The Israeli Army joined forces with the settlers to drive the farmers off the land. Israeli peace activists did their best to support the Palestinian farmers.

Occupation settler violence – beating – injury – Israeli Army collusion: Hebron – 15:00, an Israeli mob from the settlement of Beit Yattir beat up a Palestinian man, Ziyad Mohammed Younes Makhamreh, leaving him with severe injuries. Occupation soldiers then took the man prisoner.

Occupation settler violence – violation: Hebron – 19:00, Zionist fanatics assaulted people taking part in a funeral procession near the Old City area of Al Karantina and attempted to prevent the burial.

July 24

Israeli attack – agricultural sabotage: Rafah – evening, Israeli armoured vehicles and bulldozers, covered by reconnaissance aircraft, raided farms near the An Nahda neighbourhood, opened fire on houses and property and bulldozed crops.

Israeli attack: Hebron – 13:30, Israeli troops positioned near the Al Arrub refugee camp fired stun and tear gas grenades at people by the entrance to the refugee camp. Four children were detained.

Beatings – women and children – three-year-old child hospitalised: Bethlehem – 19:10, Israeli troops manning the As Sawahira ash Sharqiya (the ‘Container’) checkpoint detained a bus-load of women and children and beat them up. One of the victims, three-year-old Bassam Shafee’ Sa’adeh, was admitted to hospital.

Ethnic cleansing: Qalqilya – 22:00, the Israeli Army distributed orders for population transfers of the inhabitants of the villages Arab ar Ramadin and Arab Abu Farda. The villages have been trapped by Israel's annexation Wall near the Occupation settlement of Alfei Menashe, south of the city. (See background in Recent News Updates below.)

Abduction: Bethlehem – 12:00, Israeli soldiers abducted a 15-year-old boy, Kathem Abed Mohammed al Wahsh, from the area of Al Fureidis.

Non-violent resistance – tear gas casualties: Ramallah – 13:30, a number of participants at an international anti-annexation Wall protest in the town of Ni’lin were overcome by Israeli Army tear gas.

Non-violent resistance – tear gas casualties – detention of Luisa Morgantini: Ramallah – 13:30, a number of participants at an international anti-annexation Wall protest in the village of Bil’in were overcome by Israeli tear gas during an assault by Occupation troops in which a woman protester was injured. Israeli troops also detained the former European Parliament Vice-president, Luisa Morgantini, and an Israeli peace activist, Cobi Zentes.

Non-violent resistance – tear gas casualties: Ramallah – 13:30, a number of participants were overcome by Israeli tear gas at a protest in the village of An Nabi Salih against Israeli settler violence and theft of land for expansion of the settlement of Halamish.

Non-violent resistance – injury – tear gas casualties: Bethlehem – 13:10, a woman protester was wounded when Occupation troops attacked an international anti-annexation Wall demonstration in the village of Al Ma’sara with stun and tear gas grenades. A number of protesters were overcome by Israeli tear gas.

Non-violent resistance: Bethlehem – 13:20, Israeli troops attacked an international anti-annexation Wall protest in the village of Wadi Rahhal with stun and tear gas grenades.

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UN rights body names team to probe Gaza flotilla raid

Haaretz

Foreign ministry official calls the UN decision hasty and 'part of the UN Rights Council's obsession against Israel.'

By Reuters and Haaretz Service

The United Nations Human Rights Council appointed a team of international experts on Friday to investigate Israel's raid on a Gaza-bound aid flotilla and called on all parties to co-operate. The fact-finding team comprises three independent experts – Sir Desmond de Silva (Britain), Karl Hudson-Phillips (Trinidad and Tobago) and Mary Shanthi Dairiam (Malaysia), a UN statement said. The 47-country Council voted to set up the independent inquiry on June 2 to look into what it called violations of international law in Israel's commando attack in May in which nine Turkish pro-Palestinian activists were killed. "The expertise, independence and impartiality of the members of the mission will be devoted to clarifying the events which took place that day and their legality," said Thailand's ambassador Sihasak Phuangketkeow, current Council president. "

We call upon all parties to fully co-operate with the mission and hope that this mission will contribute to peace in the region and justice for the victims," he said.

In response to the UN's decision, a Foreign Ministry official said that the UN Human Rights Council's made its decision in haste, and that it was "part of the Rights Council's obsession against Israel."

"The Israeli probe, conducted with transparency, makes the organisation's probe completely unnecessary," the official added. The Israeli Navy stormed the flotilla on May 31, killing eight Turks and a Turkish-American on board a Turkish ship. Israel said its commandos acted in self-defence and has rejected calls for an international inquiry into the raid. But Pakistan and Sudan led a move by Muslim countries at the UN human rights body, here they hold an effective majority, to condemn the raid as outrageous and demand "full accountability and credible independent inquiries".

The UN team is expected to travel to Israel, Turkey and Gaza in August to interview witnesses and gather information before reporting back to the Council in September. The Council opens a three-week session in Geneva on Sept. 12. It was not yet clear whether Israel -- which has a long history of rejecting UN probes as one-sided -- would co-operate and allow the team to visit, according to UN sources. Israel announced in June that they would be establishing an independent public committee to investigate the raid.

"It is not ideal, but the other options are less good," Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said regarding the probe. "The flotilla to Gaza was not a one-time incident. We are in the midst of a difficult and continuous fight against the State of Israel." A retired Supreme Court justice, Jacob Turkel, is heading the committee, also includes two international observers and tackles the legality of the blockade of Gaza and the legality of the navy's actions.

A separate Israeli military inquiry released on July 12 found intelligence and operational errors in the raid but defended the use of force. De Silva is a former chief war crimes prosecutor at the UN-backed Special Court for Sierra Leone. Hudson-Phillips is a former judge at the International Criminal Court who also served as attorney-general of Trinidad and Tobago. Shanthi Dairiam is a Malaysian women's rights activist working in UN and Asian regional forums.

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International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network

The 2010 US Assembly of Jews, a national conference held in Detroit in late June, began at an unusual hour for a Jewish conclave: late on a Saturday afternoon. It wasn't the most accommodating move for participants who observe the Sabbath, but then, the conference's organisers may not have expected any: This was the first major gathering of the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network. Given that the term "anti-Zionist" is an epithet to many in the organised American Jewish community, one might assume that any American Jew who'd schlep to Michigan to discuss strategies for "decolonising Palestine" would fall outside that community's religious and cultural margins as well.

So, it came as a surprise when, at 11:30 on that first Saturday night, after an exhausting opening session, about a quarter of the 200 conference-goers, overwhelmingly under 30, gathered to celebrate havdalah, the ceremony that ushers out the Sabbath. As they swayed in a circle singing "Lo Yisa Goy," a Hebrew folksong—"and into ploughshares beat their swords, nations shall learn war no more" — the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network felt for a moment like Jewish summer camp. Many Jewish community leaders would not have been enthusiastic about the scene. And, in echoes that reverberated throughout the conference, neither were some leaders of the Jewish Anti-Zionist Network.

A growing cohort of young Jews actively involved in Jewish life — often in alternative realms like independent minyans, the Yiddish-revival movement, and social-justice organisations — are taking left-wing positions on Israel that leave them feeling marginalised even in the Jewish communities they call home. Ideologically, they range from those who couch their politics in the language of international law and ultimately favour a two-state solution to those who use the more radical language of anti-imperialism and insist that true democracy can never happen within a Jewish state — with countless shades in between. By flirting with the labels "non-Zionist" and "anti-Zionist" without abandoning other traditional affiliations, they have crossed a line into territory where there exists no well-marked space on the American Jewish ideological map.

Into this vacuum came the first conference of the two-year-old International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network, a still-obscure organisation (though one now on the watch list of some mainstream Jewish organisations) with a moniker echoing those of long-defunct groups, like the Jewish Communist Labour Bund, that tethered Jewish specificity to the international left. For many of the young Jews who turned out in Detroit — most en route to the US Social Forum, a major activist expo that was held in the city later that week — the Assembly seemed to promise a distinctly Jewish space in which to engage in or try on the ideas that Zionism does in fact equal racism and that only a one-state solution can mean justice for Palestinians — regardless of whether they take such a hard line in their day-to-day lives. But then they encountered a new problem: Their elders on the radical left didn't know what to do with them either. They were too Jewish.

"Folks like us get it from both sides," said a 27-year-old Jewish religious professional at the conference who requested anonymity because, she said, she feared repercussions if her views became known. "We're not loyal enough to the Jews and we're not pure enough for the anti-Zionists." The existence of non- and anti-Zionist Jews is in itself nothing novel; from socialist Jewish movements in pre-war Eastern Europe to the ultra-Orthodox sect Neturei Karta, they have been around as long as Zionism itself. What may be new is the emergence of a group of Jews whose leftism does not automatically equal secularism, as it did for generations of Marxists, and who, at the same time, grew up in or were welcomed into a liberal sector of the religious landscape that has grown exponentially over the past few decades. It's not hard these days, at least in most American cities with large Jewish communities, to find synagogues or minyans that explicitly welcome feminists, gay Jews, and those suspicious of religious hierarchies — as well as spaces next door for those more interested in Yiddish culture or social action.

"For the past 10 years, and particularly from the Second Lebanon War up to the present, there's been a resurgence of Jewish anti-Zionism where Zionism had once been strongest: among secular liberal Jews," said Sam Freedman, a Columbia University journalism professor who has covered the American Jewish community for decades. In a recent New York Times column, he discussed the revival of the American Council for Judaism, a non-Zionist spin off of the Reform movement. "It's gone from being a totally peripheral part of the Jewish scene to some growing minority of the Jewish scene." (According to Hebrew Union College sociologist Steven M. Cohen, no numbers yet exist on the size of the trend.)

The members of this demographic who turned up at the Assembly of Jews voiced a range of complaints about the Jewish institutions in their lives. A 25-year-old environmental activist named Hillary Lehr from Oakland, California, said she no longer wanted to visit the Reform synagogue she'd attended as a child because its pro-Israel stance was casually embedded into ritual life, from prayers for the Jewish state to tzedakah boxes for the Jewish National Fund. "I want to de-Zionise my synagogue because it's not about being a Zionist, it's about Judaism," Lehr said. "There's a generation that's ready to go back to those religious and spiritual spaces. I want to say to my rabbi, 'I want to come back to my spirituality and I want there to be space for all of us because we're all Jews.' "

Avi Grenadier, 27, who runs a progressive Jewish radio show called Radio613 in Kingston, Ontario, voiced similar objections about his religious education at a Conservative synagogue in a small Ontario town: Israel, he said, had taken the place of religious content — which meant that when he became disillusioned with the Jewish state, there was no other iteration of Judaism to fall back on. "I knew more about Mossad agents' biographies than about the Nevi'im," said Grenadier, who said he studied Jewish texts for the first time last year at Yeshivat Hadar, an egalitarian yeshiva in Manhattan. He now wears a yarmulke and observes the Sabbath. Others voiced a complaint specific to institutions at the left-most edge of the mainstream Jewish world: Because opinion on Israel can be expected to vary widely — and explosively — in such congregations and organisations, some, by dictate or custom, have simply made discussion of Israel taboo. Some non-Zionist Jews say they want what more pro-Israel factions of the community have: spaces where the Jewish state can be freely discussed and, indeed, turned into a political cause. But others questioned whether creating congregations that organise around the Palestinian cause would simply replicate the inextricability of Judaism and Zionism at more traditional places of worship.

"It's not like I'm trapped in this synagogue where there's all these Zionist politics on Shabbat and I want to create a Shabbat where there's all these anti-Zionist politics," said Aaron Levitt, 40, a former board member at West End Synagogue, a Reconstructionist congregation in Manhattan, who left the shul after several years of trying to un-moor it from allegiance to Israel (and who was not at the conference). "It would be just as bad; it might even be worse."

Levitt helped start a non-Zionist minyan this year called Page 36 with fellow Jewish pro-Palestinian activists including a young Reconstructionist rabbi, Alissa Wise — not, he said, because he ultimately wants to pray only with political comrades, but as a kind of stop-gap measure while truly "Zionist-neutral" congregations remain few and far between. At the same time, he added, the minyan was inspired by frustration with what he sees as a lack of interest among many of his co-religionist political comrades in aspects of spirituality and peoplehood that go beyond Jewish-flavoured universalist politics. "I care about Palestinians as much as anyone else," said Levitt, "but I'm engaged in all this stuff because I care about Jews and Judaism."

It was around precisely these questions of priorities — whether anti-Zionist Jewish movements should be motivated at their deepest level by concern about Jews, or about Palestinians — that the Assembly of Jews became to some extent factionalised. At one end of the spectrum were Jewish Anti-Zionist Network leaders who argued that Jewishness was relevant to the group's mission primarily to the extent to which it could be used strategically in the public-relations battle over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — and that to centre their own identities much beyond that would, ironically, become another vehicle for Jewish self-obsession. "Lots of successful movements have found resources and inspiration in spiritual and cultural work, and none of them have mistaken spiritual and cultural work for the movement itself," said Sarah Kershnar, one of the Jewish Anti-Zionist Network's founders. "The reason we pushed back on identity being the central place to act from is it sometimes lacks that connection with what's really happening in the world."

That reasoning went down well with some participants, particularly older ones who, in many cases, described themselves as red-diaper babies or as having been alienated from an older and more conservative iteration of the Jewish world for decades over anything from politics to sexuality. At the other end of the spectrum were those who hewed more closely to Levitt's view. They got their havdalah service on the Assembly's programme (though everyone else left the conference centre before it began) and led workshops on "Jewish Anti-Zionist Spiritual Reclamation" and "Reclaiming Ashkenazi Cultural Spaces From a Zionist Agenda." But tensions repeatedly surfaced, at public discussions and behind the scenes.

"It's startling how much easier it is to bring my politics to Jewish spaces than to bring my Jewishness here," said a participant active in the Boston minyan scene who wanted to remain anonymous because she hopes to apply for Hebrew school teaching jobs. "The organisers kept asking, 'What is the material benefit this will have? How is this going to end Zionism?' And it was like, we don't want to justify why we pray." For those who left the Assembly of Jews with mixed feelings, the conference may ultimately have connected them less to the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network than to a nascent, nameless network of similarly minded young people. Interested parties passed around sign-up sheets for non-Zionist Yom Kippur retreats and hatched an idea to participate in the boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement to isolate Israel by selling their own, emphatically Diaspora-made, Jewish ritual objects.

A few days after the Assembly ended, some participants who had stayed in town for the Social Forum held a non-Zionist Shabbat dinner along Detroit's waterfront. And almost immediately, they encountered a challenge: One of the few other Jewish contingents at the Social Forum had come from Hashomer Hatzair, a socialist Zionist youth movement. How to integrate the two groups while giving the anti-Zionists the Shabbat they had been promised? The event's co-ordinator crafted a text message that she hoped would address the concerns of Assembly folk while also engaging with their Zionist colleagues. "As most Jewish spaces marginalise the voices of non- and anti-Zionist Jews, this space will privilege the voices of those Jews," she wrote. But, she added: "All are welcome."

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Jewish Peace News editors: Joel Beinin - Racheli Gai - Rela Mazali - Sarah Anne Minkin - Judith Norman - Lincoln Z. Shlensky - Rebecca Vilkomerson - Alistair Welchman

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Jewish Peace News archive and blog: www.jewishpeacenews.blogspot.com

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On the Israeli Right's new 'peace' agenda

By Gilad Atzmon www.informationclearinghouse.info/article25984.htm 21 July 2010 "Information Clearing House"

As the Israelis are becoming conscious of their inevitable tragic circumstances, a final desperate attempt to rescue the Zionist project has come to life. Astonishingly enough it is the Israeli Right that is now pushing for ‘one bi-national State.’ It is pretty staggering to find out that while the Israeli so-called ‘left’ is locked within the 1967 territorial paradigm that is fuelled by Judeo centric racial ideology, it is actually the hawkish Zionist thinkers who are willing to move the discourse forward. In a mind provoking piece Noam Sheizaf outlines in Haaretz the new revolutionary Israeli idea. However, I will maintain at this stage that the new Zionist call for ‘one bi-national state’ suggests that Zionist ideology is on its last leg. Israel has come to realise its inevitable end. And amidst its terminal conditions Israel tries to buy time.

Israel should apply its law to “Judea and Samaria and grant citizenship to 1.5 million Palestinians,” says Moshe Arens, a former Israeli defence minister, a top leader in the Likud party and a political patron of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Arens is not put off by those who slander him for promoting the idea of a bi-national Jewish-Palestinian state. "We are already a bi-national state," he says. This approach is now being advocated by leading figures in the Likud and amongst the settlers. A year ago, Uri Elitzur, former chairman of the Yesha Council of Settlements and Netanyahu's bureau chief in his first term as prime minister, published an article in the settlers' journal Nekuda calling for the onset of a process, at the conclusion of which the (West Bank) Palestinians will have "a blue ID card (like Israelis), yellow license plates (like Israelis), National Insurance and the right to vote for the Knesset." Emily Amrousi, a former spokesperson for the Yesha Council, also takes part in meetings between settlers and Palestinians and speaks explicitly of "one land in which the children of settlers and the children of Palestinians will be bussed to school together."

This Zionist political novelty doesn’t take me by complete surprise. Unlike the Jewish left that is tribally orientated both in Israel and in the West, the right wing Zionist philosophy was grounded on a dream of an eternal bond between the Jew and the alleged ‘promised land’. In Zion the Jew was supposed to transcend oneself beyond the race and the tribe. Israel was there to demolish the ghetto wall. As it happened, in practice, Israel had become the biggest ghetto in Jewish history. However, there is a clear trap here. As much as the peace loving Zionist hawks seem to champion Palestinian civil rights, the vision of a ‘one bi-national state’ is still totally Judeo centric. The Israeli advocates of the one bi-national state are not talking about a neutral "state of all its citizens", nor about "Israstine" with a flag showing a crescent and a Shield of David. One state still means a sovereign Jewish state, but in a more complex reality, and inspired by the vision of a “democratic Jewish state” without an occupation and without apartheid, without fences and separations.

One may wonder at this stage what the notion of “Jewish democratic state” stands for. It is obviously an empty signifier, there is no such a thing as Jewish democracy. As far as I remember Democracy was born in Athens rather than Jerusalem. And yet, the dream is compelling. In such a state, “Jews will be able to live in Hebron and pray at the Tomb of the Patriarchs, and a Palestinian from Ramallah will be able to serve as an ambassador and live in Tel Aviv or simply enjoy ice cream on the city's seashore.” It is clear beyond doubt that a coin has dropped. Some Israeli hawks have come to realise that the occupation cannot be maintained forever. They were also quick to grasp that, in the long run, the separation wall put an end to the Zionist expansionist programme. They also gather that the negative exposure of Jewish lobbies in the West will eventually lead to the down-scaling of Israeli political manoeuvring. However, the Zionist tribal orientation is never too difficult to trace. When Elitzur was asked “What do you say to the allegations that you have joined the radical left?” he was quick to reveal his political mantra. "There's a clear separation between us. I am talking about a Jewish state, the state of the Jewish people, which will contain a large Arab minority. The left is talking about an Arab state containing a Jewish minority, even if they do not explicitly think that. The leftist demonstrators in (the West Bank village of) Bil'in have totally joined the Palestinian cause."

I guess that this what it is all about. The Israeli hawks want to counter the inevitable 'demographic disaster'. They would offer West Bank Palestinians Israeli ID cards, and offer them to “enjoy ice cream in Tel Aviv” as long as they are kept as a minority. The Israeli hawks ignore Gaza and the right of return. In practice they dismiss the Palestinian cause for they are certain that the Jewish one is superior. In short, this is not a solution or a resolution. It is just another Zionist spin that is planted in our discourse in order to disseminate confusion.

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Israel gaols Arab for 'deceit rape'

http://english.aljazeera.net/news/middleeast/2010/07/201072191017847251.html

An Arab living in Israel has been sentenced to 18 months in prison for having consensual sex with an Israeli woman who apparently believed he was Jewish. Sabbar Kashur was sentenced on Monday after being convicted of "rape by deception". According to the court, Kashur met a Jewish woman in Jerusalem in 2008 and introduced himself as a single Jew looking for a serious relationship. The two had sex in a nearby building. The woman filed a criminal complaint after learning Kashur was Arab, not Jewish. Prosecutors acknowledged that the sex was consensual, but accused him of misrepresenting himself. The court agreed, sentencing Kashur despite acknowledging that his case was not "a classical rape by force".

"If she hadn’t thought the accused was a Jewish bachelor interested in a serious romantic relationship, she would not have co-operated," the judges said in their ruling. "The court must protect the public interest against sophisticated criminals with a smooth tongue and sweet talking, who can lead astray innocent victims."

'Deceit'

The Israeli criminal code mentions "deceit" as a possible aggravating factor in sexual assault cases and the verdict in Kashur's case is not the first time an Israeli court has sentenced a man for "rape by deception," according to several Israeli lawyers. The most notable case was in 2008, when Israel's high court of justice upheld the conviction of Zvi Sleiman, a man who impersonated a housing ministry official and promised women apartments and benefits in exchange for sex. A rape conviction sentence could be upheld, the court ruled, when "a person lies does not tell the truth regarding critical matters to a reasonable woman".

Several other men have been convicted of "rape by deception" since that ruling. But the Kashur case appears to be the first time a person's race has been used as the determining factor. "In this case, the ruling seems to say that if a 'reasonable' Jewish woman knew a man was an Arab, then she would not make love to him," Abeer Baker, an attorney with Adalah, an organisation that advocates for Arab rights in Israel, said. Baker called it a "dangerous precedent," saying it would allow the Israeli government to interfere in the private lives of citizens. "It's interfering in a very intimate, personal decision," she said. "That should be made between two people. The court should not interfere."

Open hostility

Similar laws have been controversial in other countries, as well. A man in the United States was convicted in 2007 of impersonating his brother in order to have sex with his girlfriend. That conviction was overturned on appeal, though, after an appellate court ruled that rape laws apply only to non-consensual sex. Kashur's case also highlights the open hostility with which many Israeli Jews view mixed relationships with Arabs, who make up one-fifth of the population of Israel. A poll conducted in 2007 by Israel's Geocartography Institute found that more than 50 per cent of Israeli Jews  thought marrying an Arab was "equal to national treason". Jews are legally forbidden to intermarry in Israel. The Sunday Times reported in 2009 on a squad of "vigilantes" in the Jewish settlement of Pisgat Zeev. The group has patrolled the streets for more than a decade  looking for mixed couples. And in 2009, the town of Petah Tikva established a team of counsellors and psychologists to "rescue" Jewish women from relationships with Arab men.

The Israeli daily Maariv reported in February that Tel Aviv had launched a similar programme. Gideon Levy, a liberal columnist with the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, said the "rape by deception" law would have been applied differently if a Jewish man had sex with an Arab woman under false pretences. "Would he have been convicted of rape?" Levy asked. "The answer is: of course not."

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Behind the Wall

Rich Wiles is a photographic artist who has been living and working in Palestine for some years. His photographic work has been shown around Europe, the US, Australia and in Palestine itself. Since 2006 he has been writing from Occupied Palestine under the title Behind the Wall. Much of this work is based in and around the refugee camps in Palestine, highlighting daily life and memories of refugees who still live in forced exile for over 60 years since Al Nakba (The Catastrophe). www.richwiles.com

Palestinian Resistance

Ali Kazak's newsletter Occupied Palestine: News and Articles This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it contains many news summaries that include both armed and non-violent methods of resistance to the Occupation. The newsletter also contains much other useful reporting.

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