The Jewish National Fund has won plaudits for its environmental work, but its real mission – pursued to this very day – is uprooting Palestinians on behalf of the Israeli state, not planting trees.
New film The Voice of Ahmad documents an extraordinary story from Israel's early years – and erased from its official history – when the kibbutz movement adopted small numbers of Palestinian teens at the same time as stealing the village lands of their new recruits.
Human rights groups have warned that the ban entry to Afula's public park for Palestinian citizens marks a growing trend by local authorities representing the Jewish majority towards explicit separation of public space in ways reminiscent of apartheid South Africa.
Armed with Donald Trump's blessing after he moved the US embassy to Jerusalem nearly a year ago, experts say Israel is now working more quickly, more confidently and more intensively to expel Palestinians from the city of their birth.
The Israeli military made an unexpected admission last week. It warned a parliamentary committee that Jews are for the first time outnumbered by the Palestinians living under Israeli rule, both those inside Israel and in the occupied territories. Israeli officials’ ultimate fear is that the world will judge a minority of Israelis ruling over a majority of Palestinians as a new form of apartheid.
How would you describe a white town in the United States that froze the tender for plots of land in a new neighbourhood because it risked allowing blacks to move in? As racist? And yet, replace the word “white” with “Jewish” and this describes what has just happened in Kfar Vradim, a small town in the Galilee. Vradim’s policy cannot be judged in isolation. It reflects how Israeli society has been intentionally structured for decades.
More than a decade ago, US President Jimmy Carter warned that Israel was practising apartheid in the occupied Palestinian territories. But in truth, it would be more accurate to say Israel itself is an apartheid state.
Israel has quietly revoked the citizenship of thousands of members of its large Palestinian minority in recent years, highlighting that decades of demographic war against Palestinians are far from over. According to government data, some 2,600 Bedouins are likely to have had their Israeli citizenship voided. Officials, however, have conceded that the figure may be much higher.
Israeli police have refused to return the body of Yacoub Abu al-Qiyan, two days after he was shot dead during a pre-dawn raid to bulldoze his home and those of another dozen families in Umm al-Hiran. But claims that he was an ISIS terrorist who used his car to ram into police, killing an officer, have rapidly unravelled. Video evidence and a leaked autopsy suggest police caused the accident by opening fire on his car, and then allowed him to bleed to death.
