Racist Israeli atrocities by far right Netanyahu apartheid

[Whitehall_Bin_Men]

Ibrahim Abu Thuraya: Disabled Palestinian activist shot dead by Israeli troops in Jerusalem protest

Outrage after double amputee among of eight Palestinians killed since Donald Trump recognised Jerusalem as Israel's capital

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/ibrahim-abu-thuray a-dead-shot-killed-israel-jerusalem-protest-disabled-no-legs-wheelchai r-a8114766.html

Rachel Roberts Saturday 16 December 2017 22:06 GMT The Independent Online

Ibraheem Abu Thuraya had lost his legs and a kidney in an air strike in 2008

A Palestinian activist who lost his legs in an air strike has been shot dead by Israeli troops as he protested against the US decision to recognise Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.

Wheelchair-bound Ibraheem Abu Thuraya, 29, was one of four Palestinians killed during Friday’s violent clashes, according to officials. Witnesses said he was unarmed.

The Palestinian Authority’s health ministry said Mr Thuraya was shot just east of Gaza City, with the Israeli army saying it opened fire on the “main instigators” of violent protests at the Gaza border. A 31-year-old, Yasser Sokhar, was killed in the same clash.

The violent protests followed the decision by Donald Trump earlier this month to officially recognise Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.

Another 82 Palestinians were injured, five of them seriously, in clashes along Gaza’s border with Israel, the health ministry said.

Mr Thuraya had lost his legs and a kidney in an air strike, according to local reports, and was regularly seen with other Palestinian activists at protests.

“He was injured in 2008 by an Israeli helicopter that targeted him after he brought down the Israeli flag and raised the Palestinian flag along the border,” his brother Samir told AFP .

“It did not stop him from demonstrating for Jerusalem. He went alone every day to the border.”

He is understood to have washed cars for a living and told Shehab News in 2016 he hoped one day he could go abroad to get prosthetic legs. The group Irish Friends of Palestine helped raise money for his motorised scooter, according to its website.

In video footage apparently recorded shortly before his death, Mr Thuraya can be seen carrying the Palestinian flag and waving the victory sign at Israeli soldiers.

In another video, he is heard saying: “This land is our land. We are not going to give up. America has to withdraw the declaration it has made.”

Tear gas was reportedly used against the protesters and at some point Mr Thuraya abandoned his wheelchair, crawling through the grass before he was shot.

His funeral took place on Saturday, The Guardian reported.

Photos and videos showing Mr Thuraya being pushed in his wheelchair shortly before his death have been widely shared on social media.

Nasser Atta, a Jerusalem-based journalist, said on Twitter the death of the Gaza amputee “will be the beginning of the start of a third intifada, they compare him to Mohammed al-Dura killed during the Second Intifada”.

Mohammed al-Dura was a 12-year-old boy killed by Israeli forces during rioting on the Gaza Strip in 2000, prompting worldwide condemnation and violent retribution.

According to the Middle East Eye, Mr Thuraya was known for climbing electricity poles and holding up Palestinian flags during protests.

He told the Irish Friends of Palestine: “Please never look at my disabled body, look at the great job I am doing. I never get despaired. It’s not the end of the world and life should go on.”

Several thousand Palestinians took part in Friday’s protests at the West Bank, Jerusalem and Gaza, according to Israeli forces and eyewitness accounts.

“During the violent riots IDF (Israel Defence Force) soldiers fired selectively towards main instigators,” the military said in a statement.

It said demonstrators in the West Bank threw firebombs and rocks and rolled flaming tyres at soldiers and border police.

Another Palestinian was shot and killed after he reportedly stabbed an Israeli soldier during clashes at the West Bank border, according to reports which claimed he was believed to have been wearing a suicide belt.

He was named by the Palestinian Health Ministry as 29-year-old Mohammed Aqal.

Protests have raged for the past 10 days in the disputed territories since Mr Trump’s announcement – highly controversial because Jerusalem is a holy place to Jews, Christians and Muslims.

Israeli forces seized control of East Jerusalem from Arab forces in the 1967 Middle East War and later annexed it in a move considered illegal under international law.

Israel has maintained a blockade of Gaza for a decade, claiming this is necessary to contain the territory's Islamist rulers Hamas, who have called for a new uprising in response to Mr Trump's Jerusalem declaration.

Mr Trump said the announcement merely recognises the reality that Jerusalem already effectively serves as the Israeli capital and is not intended to alter the city's borders.[/u]

[Whitehall_Bin_Men]

Robert Martin is in Hebron, West Bank.
30 October 2017 ·
Issa Amro tells us about the blatant racism, dehumanization and clear apartheid here in Hebron.



https://facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=10155918838142533&id=7411275 32

[TonyGosling]

ISRAELI ELECTION


This Israeli election is between the right wing and the even more right wing
8th April 2019 Home, Highlights, Israel
Israeli fascist electoral contenders 2019
By Jonathan Cook in Nazareth
https://www.redressonline.com/2019/04/this-israeli-election-is-between -the-right-wing-and-the-even-more-right-wing/

Israel’s election campaign, now in its last days, must be the first in which a sitting Israeli prime minister has sought to win over voters by boasting about how much he insulted a president of the United States.

One of the last campaign videos by Binyamin Netanyahu spliced together media clips of US analysts voicing disbelief back in 2011 at the Israeli prime minister’s public humiliation of Barack Obama.

The advertisement not only described Netanyahu as “lecturing” Obama, but showed him visibly angering the US president by berating him for chasing “illusions” in his pursuit of peace talks with the Palestinians. It closed with Likud’s campaign slogan: “Netanyahu. Right-wing. Strong.”

Plumping new depths
Netanyahu’s electioneering has rarely been subtle. But after Israel’s attorney-general announced during the campaign that the prime minister faced corruption indictments, Netanyahu has had every incentive to plumb new depths.

His officials have stated that his main rival, Benny Gantz, a general he once appointed as military chief of staff, is mentally unstable. One Likud video showed Gantz’s head emerging from a cuckoo clock.

The character assassination has been aided by the leaking of a recording of an off-guard Gantz saying that, if he could have done so, Netanyahu would have had him killed.

Netanayhu’s team also exploited, and possibly leaked, a claim that Gantz’s mobile phone was hacked by Iran. “If he couldn’t protect his own phone, how will he protect our country?” Netanyau has said.

Innuendo has suggested that compromising information on the phone could be used for blackmail.

Gantz, who heads the Blue and White Party, hardly emerges spotless, either. He has steeped himself in dubious military glory with advertisements showing footage of the devastation in Gaza that he presided over, a bombing spree that killed more than 500 children. The video bragged about his sending the enclave “back to the Stone Age”.

Blue and White, which includes two other high-powered generals, is the Israeli security establishment’s effort to oust Netanyahu, who is seen as having squandered international goodwill with his public intransigence on peacemaking.

Colonies and annexation
The generals are no less opposed to Palestinian statehood. They understand the Israeli public’s mood: a recent survey shows that more than 40 per cent of Israelis favour some form of annexation of the West Bank.

Pandering to these sentiments, Netanyahu said at the weekend he would extend Israeli sovereignty to the West Bank during his next term.

Gantz has shown no inclination to stray far from this consensus. In his inaugural campaign speech, he said he would “strengthen the settlement blocs” as well as “retain control of security in the entire land of Israel”, which includes the West Bank and Gaza.

He has repeatedly evaded questions about what solution he proposes for the Palestinians.

But, like most other security officials, Gantz believes it is important for Israel to court the West by giving the appearance of a willingness to negotiate.

This is a straightforward slugging match between the right wing (Gantz) and the even more right wing (Netanyahu).

Nonetheless, it is no simple matter to dislodge Netanyahu from power after he has won three general elections over the past decade on his security record.

He did so on previous occasions by vanquishing the country’s founding Labour Party, which has traditionally presented itself as centre-left. Over time, faced with an unassailable Netanyahu, Labour leaders stopped paying lip service to the Oslo peace accords they signed a quarter of a century ago.

Instead, they began to champion illegal Jewish settlements on Palestinian territory nearly as vociferously as the ruling Likud Party.

This time, there are no left-leaning parties in the running. This is a straightforward slugging match between the right wing (Gantz) and the even more right wing (Netanyahu).

For most of the campaign, the two parties have been neck and neck. To form the next government, Netanyahu or Gantz must forge deals with much smaller parties in the 120-member parliament to gain a majority.

Courting fascists
Netanyahu will need a mix of the far-right and religious-extremist factions he has previously relied on to clear the 61-seat threshold. To help, he has invited into a future coalition Jewish Power – the rebranded fascists of Kach, a party that was outlawed more than 20 years ago.

Gantz, on the other hand, is caught in an electoral trap. He will either have to out-right-wing Netanyahu to win over these same extremist parties, or secure the backing of Jewish centre-left groups and parties representing Israel’s Palestinian citizens, a fifth of the population.

Bearing in mind his military career, Gantz risks alienating his core support if he suggests a readiness to enter into a deal with the Zionist left or with the country’s Palestinian minority.

Netanyahu understands Gantz’s bind. At the last election, in 2015, the Israeli prime minister warned on polling day that “the Arabs” – Israel’s own Palestinian citizens – were “coming out in droves” to vote. He added that the Jewish left was supposedly “bussing them” to polling stations.

Throughout this campaign, Netanyahu has fanned similar flames. During a recent TV interview, he accused the Palestinian parties of supporting terrorism. He has even characterised the possibility of loose, informal support from Palestinian legislators for a Gantz-led government as “working to eliminate the state of Israel”.

In a recent interview Gantz also said the Palestinian leadership in Israel “speaks out against the State of Israel, so I cannot have a political discourse with it”. He has said he will sit only with parties that are “Jewish and Zionist”.

Meanwhile, Yair Lapid, a former TV news host and Gantz’s electoral partner, voted along with Likud to ban two Palestinian parties already in the parliament from running in the election. The decision was overturned in the courts.

Palestinian citizens – forgotten and demonised
None of this has been lost on Israel’s Palestinian voters. They have had to sit through an allegedly ironic campaign video by the current justice minister, Ayelet Shaked, of the settler-allied New Right Party, in which she sprays herself with a perfume labelled “Fascism”.

They have also seen Oren Hazan, a legislator in Netanyahu’s Likud party, emerging from a bubble bath, in a James Bond parody video, to shoot dead a lookalike of a leading Israeli-Palestinian politician.

In Nazareth, the largest Palestinian city in Israel, it has been hard to discern that an election is just around the corner. There have been few posters or rallies, and no excitement. According to a late poll, half of Palestinian voters in Israel intend to stay home.

Whether Netanyahu or Gantz wins, more legislation will be drafted to advance institutional discrimination against the Palestinian minority, and the abusive treatment of Palestinians in the occupied territories will intensify.

In part, that reflects a protest at the Nation-State Basic Law, passed last summer, which made explicit Israel’s self-definition as a Jewish state: that Palestinians can never properly be Israeli citizens and that they will always be viewed as unwelcome interlopers.

But it is also a judgment that any success by the Palestinian parties, split in this election into two acrimonious camps, will have no impact on the direction Israeli policy takes.

Whether Netanyahu or Gantz wins, more legislation will be drafted to advance institutional discrimination against the Palestinian minority, and the abusive treatment of Palestinians in the occupied territories will intensify.

US President Donald Trump has done his best to give Netanyahu an electoral leg-up. That has included the recognition of Israeli claims to sovereignty over the Golan Heights and an invitation to the White House days before polling.

Last-minute surprises are still possible, but most expect Netanyahu to win outright. Even if the election is indecisive, Israeli history suggests that the most likely outcome is a national unity government between the two largest parties.

Whatever Netanyahu and Gantz claim now about being bitter enemies, the truth is that, ideologically, they have more in common than either cares to admit.