I can’t imagine being kicked out of my house, much less so quickly the dishes are still on the table. But this is what’s been happening since the late 40’s. You could be enjoying a nice Sunday meal and then you’re out on the street because an Israeli took it. The world simply doesn’t care.
No wonder a desperate people turn to desperate measures.
- Doc
Yep.
But the current hostage/prisoner swap deal is promising. Hope it plays out. Media already poisoning the well on this issue as well. Both sides took captives illegally, but the Israeli captives are hostages. For years Israel had been kidnapping taking thousands of people and calling them prisoners. Western media is only happy to follow that narrative. Because this "all started with a terrorist attack," and Israel is just perpetually "defending itself."
"I am not an American ... In my view premarital sex should be illegal ...(there are) mentally challenged people with special needs like myself- Ajax18
Israeli history professor loses his job after he was arrested and jailed four days for sedition when he posted his support for the Palestinian people on Facebook.
I can’t imagine being kicked out of my house, much less so quickly the dishes are still on the table. But this is what’s been happening since the late 40’s. You could be enjoying a nice Sunday meal and then you’re out on the street because an Israeli took it. The world simply doesn’t care.
No wonder a desperate people turn to desperate measures.
- Doc
Yep.
But the current hostage/prisoner swap deal is promising. Hope it plays out. Media already poisoning the well on this issue as well. Both sides took captives illegally, but the Israeli captives are hostages. For years Israel had been kidnapping taking thousands of people and calling them prisoners. Western media is only happy to follow that narrative. Because this "all started with a terrorist attack," and Israel is just perpetually "defending itself."
The distinctions between hostage and prisoner have been around decades. If you think that the rule of law is important, there's a good reason for that. All states get to enforce criminal laws when they have the jurisdiction to do so. I'd have to review the list of 300 prisoners proposed for exchange, but it includes people who have been tried and convicted of murder. Prisoner is the term applied to nation-states that detain people using the police power under color of law. (Don't confuse "color of law" with "properly applied law.)
Hostages, on the other hand, are people who are detained, not under color of law, but to extract some benefit from or cause harm to some other private or public entity. If bank robbers detain bank employees in exchange for concessions that allow them to escape legal consequences, the detainees are hostages. When Iranians seized Americans protected by diplomatic immunity, the people taken were hostages.
Hamas had no legal jurisdiction to detain Israeli citizens in Israel on October 7. They were not seized under color of law. They have not been accused of violating the law of Gaza. They were taken to extract some kind of concessions from the government of a nation state. Thus, they are hostages.
Voluntary offering of hostages historically was used at times as a tool of diplomacy as a guarantee that a government would live up to a treaty or other agreement. I can't think of an example in modern times.
Under modern rules of war, any Gazans Israel captures during the course of the war are considered prisoners, which entitles them to the benefits of rights under the Geneva Convention. And the reverse should hold true for Israelis capture by Gaza during the course of the war. Unfortunately, the United States screwed this system up during the "war on terrorism," when it made up out of whole cloth the category "enemy combatant." I haven't seen anything yet that indicates whether Israel is claiming that Gazans they capture are "prisoners of war" or "enemy combatants." I hope it's the former and that "enemy combatant" finds itself on a garbage heap of history.
Once again, a CFR on your claim that the Israeli government has "kidnapped" "thousands" of people as opposed to arresting them under color of law for violation of criminal laws. Maybe it happened, or maybe you are quibbling over standard usage of terms in this specific case, but it's a pretty strong claim.
he/him we all just have to live through it,
holding each other’s hands.
Israeli history professor loses his job after he was arrested and jailed four days for sedition when he posted his support for the Palestinian people on Facebook.
State Prosecutor Amit Eisman has sharply criticized the police conduct toward citizens who protested against the government, claiming that the force’s actions amount to harming the rule of law.
A source told Haaretz that Eisman sent a sharp letter to the head of the police’s Department of Investigations and Intelligence, Maj. Gen. Yigal Ben-Shalom, which had since caused much tribulation at the national police headquarters in Jerusalem.
***
Haaretz has learned that the [State] prosecutor’s office was particularly enraged about the police handling of the case of Dr. Meir Baruchin, a history teacher from Jerusalem who was arrested following a social media post.
Before the war started, Baruchin posted on Facebook photos of Palestinians who were killed by Israel’s security forces in the West Bank, writing that they were “executed by our outstanding boys.” Baruchin then wrote “Nakba” next to pictures of children killed in Gaza. The police also investigated him about a comment he made regarding rape that Hamas terrorists perpetrated on October 7, in which he noted that soldiers in the IDF raped Palestinian women in 1948.
Following these allegations, Baruchin clarified that he condemned Hamas’ crimes. After the war broke out, he was fired from his job as a teacher, and complaints were filed against him with the police.
The police attributed to Baruchin “intent to commit treason,” an offense that is rarely used and for which the maximum penalty is 10 years in prison. Jerusalem Magistrate’s Court Judge Oren Silverman extended his arrest by four days. He was later released on bail and banned from using the internet for 15 days. No indictment was filed against Baruchin, and it seems that there is no intention to prosecute him.
At first, the police were seeking approval from the prosecution to open an investigation for incitement and the support of terrorism against Baruchin. Haaretz has learned that in his legal opinion, Deputy State Prosecutor Shlomo Lamberger stated that there is no justification for such a measure. However, despite this clear assertion, the police then decided to arrest Baruchin and charge him with a much more serious offense.
A person who is acquainted with Eisman’s letter told Haaretz that the state prosecutor stated in it that the arrest was carried out in complete opposition to the State Prosecutor’s Office while bypassing it and in clear deviation from standard procedure. In the letter, Eisman asked police investigations head Ben-Shalom to investigate the sequence of events in the different cases and to make sure that they do not repeat themselves.
A senior police source rejected the criticism. “The requests for these arrests were reviewed by a court,” he told Haaretz. “In Baruchin’s case, he was indeed arrested, and in the case in the town of Omer, the arrest was changed to house arrest, so it cannot be determined that these were unreasonable measures.”
In it's lead editoral on November 14, Haaretz said:
Baruchin isn’t alone. Over the last month, dozens of Arab Israelis have been arrested over alleged incitement. Both the police and the prosecution are party to this move, which significantly curtails freedom of expression in Israel. Even if some of these statements are uncomfortable for Israelis to hear, they should be permitted as long as they don’t constitute genuine incitement.
At a time when the government is seeking to silence people, the police and prosecution shouldn’t agree to do the work of persecution for it. The courts must prevent this and protect Israelis and their freedoms.
I suspect that what got local officials riled up is the implicit justification of rapes on October 7 by comparing them to rapes by the IDF in 1948. Even so, he never should have been arrested for his speech. We're luckier than we realize that we have express Constitutional protection for speech and that our modern courts have interpreted it broadly. Abuses like this is why I'm an unapologetic supporter of the First Amendment.
he/him we all just have to live through it,
holding each other’s hands.
and the instances of documented injustices levied on Palestinian children are innumerable, but we see Israel’s treatment of children has been consistent:
By the late 1980s, two generations of Palestinian children had grown up under military occupation which showed no sign of coming to an end. The children of 1967 had become adults and their children experienced the accumulated pain of a generation enduring a childhood under military occupation. In particular since the early 1980s Palestinian children suffered from severe economic deprivation and the policies of the occupying Power. Collective punishments, beatings, arrests, deportations, curfews, school closures, interruptions of health and welfare services, refusals to issue building permits for homes and restrictions regarding the reunification of families abounded. These aggravated the effects of serious economic problems as well as the consequences of the large-scale appropriation of land and water resources and of the establishment of tens of thousands of settlers in the occupied Palestinian territory by the occupying Power. An unprecedented degree of frustration and rage accumulated in Palestinian children. Since December 1987, the Palestinian popular uprising, the intifadah, has provided an unequivocal expression of the determination of Palestinian people, particularly the children, not to accept occupation, humiliation and deprivation which were imposed on their parents and from which their families and they continue to suffer.
In the report it talks about things like Israeli thieves stealing land and then attacking Palestinians with firearms under the protection of the Israeli government, Palestinian children (child is defined as under 15 for some reason) being savaged by soldiers for mundane offenses, and on and on. There’s even an Israeli official ON RECORD gleefully taking about aggravating Palestinian parents so much that they beat their own kids to death.
There’s even an Israeli official ON RECORD gleefully taking about aggravating Palestinian parents so much that they beat their own kids to death.
I don’t know, man. It sounds like the guy was just making things up, ‘cause it’s impossible to aggravate a parent so much that he or she will beat his or her own child to death.
There’s even an Israeli official ON RECORD gleefully taking about aggravating Palestinian parents so much that they beat their own kids to death.
I don’t know, man. It sounds like the guy was just making things up, ‘cause it’s impossible to aggravate a parent so much that he or she will beat his or her own child to death.
Perhaps, here’s the full quote from the UN doc:
During the intifadah, family members were increasingly forced by the occupation authorities to police their children in order to prevent the arrest of a child or to bring about the release of a child from detention. For instance, policies were adopted whereby an arrested child was released only after guardians paid money or signed a statement indicating that the child would not commit an offence in the future.146/ As the definition as to what constituted an offence was steadily widened, families faced an ever-increasing burden to police and discipline their children. The following was suggested by a high-ranking official in the Israeli Government, as quoted recently in Le Monde diplomatique: “‘One has to get parents so angry at their children that the parents feel like beating them to death.'”147/ When Palestinian families were compelled to carry out police functions, important emotional ties were also broken, making children suffer.
The UN document goes into the widespread arrests and insane abuse children suffer at the hands of Israel. So, the quote above is in context to that discussion; making families pay for whatever offenses a child, and I do mean child, may have committed.
I think the thing a lot of the world forgets is the Palestinians are slowly, house by house, parcel by parcel, orchard by orchard, year after year, are being squeezed either out of the area, or, frankly, to death. Any peace brokered by Israel has always resulted in more indignities, abuse, and theft. It’s pretty damned disgusting.
Thanks for posting that report, Doc. It’s the first report I’ve seen that focuses on the well being of Palestinian children during the Israeli occupation of Gaza and the West Bank. To the world’s shame, Palestinians have been treated as someone else’s problem since the end of the British mandate in 1948. Lots of words have been said and lots of ink has been spilled, but no nation has been willing to do the heavy lifting needed to help the Palestinians build a functioning nation. Reading that report led me read a bunch of material to try and understand how the world sat back and allowed the conditions to develop that produced a generation of enraged children — enraged to the point that they started throwing rocks at armed soldiers. How did that happen in an area of the world that had been the focus of attention for decades? How did it happen that Israel, which has the most to gain from having stable, healthy, functional states as neighbors, actively sabotaged the ability of Palestinians to form that kind of nation on its borders? And why did the rest of the world simply let it happen?
The two-state solution that created the best chance for a functioning Palestine was the UN proposal, backed by the United States, made near the end of the British Mandate. Google a map of the proposed states of Palestine and Israel. Palestine had sufficient contiguous real estate to function as a nation. The two nations were weirdly intertwined, especially for two groups that didn’t care much for each other, but it was the best deal Palestine would ever see.
Instead, war it was, and when the dust settled, there was a nation state of Israel and two geographically separated chunks of land that weren’t the nation state of Palestine. Jordan annexed the West Bank. Egypt administered the Gaza Strip ostensibly on behalf of a future nation state of Palestine. After pressure from other members of the Arab League, Jordan grudgingly agreed to hold the West Bank in trust for a future Palestine. But, somehow, nobody got around to making this future state into a real state. In fact, it’s hard to find any serious discussion of how to make two pieces of land geographically inaccessible to each other without passing through a hostile nation into a functional nation.
As a result of the war, there were forced and voluntary migrations of Palestinians out of Israel and Jews out of Arab countries. Except that the Jews had a country they could migrate to. Palestinians had no country; they had to become refugees in other countries. Jordan eventually extended full citizenship to Palestinians in the West Bank. No other Arab country did, on the grounds that it would undermine the effort to make future Palestine real. Which they didn’t get around to doing. Neither did the UN, the US, the USSR, or the other major powers. The UN did, however, create a relief organization to support the needs of Palestinian refugees. That was as close as anyone got to taking care of Palestinian children. The US was the largest donor until the Trump Administration completely cut US funding of the organization. The Biden Administration restored it.
Then Egypt, who I think was playing the US and the USSR of each other for $$$$, started denying Israel access to the Suez Canal. I didn’t know this, but using the Suez Canal requires ships to pass through a strait entirely within Egypt’s territorial waters. So, regardless of who controlled the canal, Egypt controlled access to the canal. Israel depended on access to the canal for importing oil. This dispute over access to the canal resulted in the first UN Peacekeeping force being deployed to the Egyptian border.
Israel had mass it clear that it considered denial of access to the canal as an act of war. So, naturally, Nassar denied access in 1967, and we got the six-day war. When the dust settled on that one, future Palestine was under military occupation by Israel. Egypt lost not only the Gaza Strip, but the entire Sinai Peninsula. Jordan lost control over the West Bank. And that’s where the paper you linked to begins.
Initially, indicators of children’s well being improved under the occupation. Infant mortality declined and lifespan increased. So did education. But that didn’t last. Israel adopted an apartheid system of government in the occupied territories. Israeli citizens in the occupied territories were subject to Israeli law, including the benefits of Israeli citizenship. Palestinians were subject to much more restrictive laws with no rights of citizenship.
Palestinians understandably resented and resisted military occupation by a hostile nation. And the culture of contempt and oppression described in the report developed over time. The first time I’d Become aware of the issue was in Law School, during the few years leading up to the first intifada. I attended a presentation by one of our international law experts who’d spent some time in the occupied territories. One of things he’d found most disheartening was the degree of outright contempt that the occupation forces displayed on a daily basis for the occupied people they were responsible for. Animals, not people. It was shocking to me.
The issue was incredibly divisive for the student body. The Native American Law Students Association was actively supporting the Palestinians. When a PLO representative was allowed entry into the US to address the UN, the Native American group invited the PLO representative to speak on campus. At that time, the PLO was a terrorist organization worth the express goal of the destruction of Israel. The Jewish students had a meltdown, invaded the auditorium, and shut the speech down. I understood why. It was the equivalent of inviting an Al-Queda representative to speak on campus after 9/11.
But who was minding the store in the occupied territories? Who was monitoring the occupation to make sure Israel was complying with the duties of an occupying power that Israel had agreed to as a member of the UN?
What about Egypt, former administer of The Gaza Strip? Well, it finally cut a deal that got the Sinai peninsula back, but hung Gaza out to dry — still under military occupation. Jordan? It simply declared that the PLO was the official representative of Palestine and relinquished all claims to (and responsibility for) the West Bank. The two nations with some claim on future Palestine threw the Palestinians under the bus. They abdicated any responsibility for making future Palestine to an avowed terrorist organization with no political standing to do anything.
And the US? We were focused on two priorities: oil and Cold War struggles for influence in the region and fighting the USSR’s influence. First Egypt, then Iran. Then Iraq. Throw Syria in there. In Israel, we had a proxy to battle the Russian bear. Creating a functional Palestine just wasn’t a priority. And who negotiates with terrorists.
And so the Palestinians and their children persisted as the region’s unwanted stepchildren. Until the generation of children described in the report were so enraged by the brutality they and their parents and families had experienced for their entire lives enraged them to the point of throwing rocks at soldiers. And the response of the military occupiers was to ratchet up the brutality and oppression until the intifada exploded and scared the living hell out of everyone enough to pay attention — at least for a while. But not long enough to give Palestinians the incentive and the physical ability to form a government capable of using law enforcement to prosecute terrorism.
And now we see the creation of new generation of enraged children, brutalized by the campaign in Gaza. We see the result of pretending that Palestinians and their children are other people’s problem. So, who is willing to do the heavy lifting — which is now exponentially heavier because of decades of looking the other way?
Biden tried public support/private arm twisting. He got a temporary pause for hostage/prisoner exchange. If he can leverage that into a permanent cease fire, good on him. But no aid package to Israel without concessions. Big ones, including application of the Pottery Barn rule, commitments to withdraw illegal settlements, and no military occupation of Gaza. Maybe temporary administration by the UN or the Arab league while Gaza’s infrastructure is rebuilt. And the cost of rebuilding is shared among all nations who let this happen by treating Palestine as someone else’s problem.
You want Gazas to eliminate terrorism in their borders? Give them a better deal than the terrorists do and give them the means to build effective law enforcement. Then we can cut back on giving taxpayer dollars to the military-industrial complex using Israel as a conduit.
And never take your eyes off the kids.
he/him we all just have to live through it,
holding each other’s hands.
I don't understand why it is so hard for both sides figure out that they both would be better off and happier if they could bring themselves to stop this insane mutual hatred for each other and work together for the benefit of both. And I don't understand why anyone would wish for the "Two State Solution." I can't help but believe that a "One State Solution" with both sides respecting each other as equals and learning from each other ought to be the ultimate goal.
No precept or claim is more suspect or more likely to be false than one that can only be supported by invoking the claim of Divine authority for it--no matter who or what claims such authority.
I saw a video of an Israeli officer beating the everliving crap out of a Palestinian kid. So I spent some time googling videos of Israelis beating Palestinian children and was, of course, unsurprised to find so many documented instances.
If the roles were reversed, wouldn’t choruses of outraged voices be calling for justice? Our collective moral compass is off.
Collective punishments, beatings, arrests, deportations, curfews, school closures, interruptions of health and welfare services, refusals to issue building permits for homes and restrictions regarding the reunification of families abounded. 