Israeli Occupation

The worst worries of a child’s school day should be homework. Maybe a lost book, or an argument with a friend. No child’s walk to school should routinely involve armed soldiers and fear of sometimes being chased and assaulted by angry adults. But for the Palestinian children who live with their families in the small rural villages that make up the South Hebron Hills, this is how the school day begins. Illegal settlements and outposts isolate and separate their villages and soldiers are a constant in their lives.

The Wall was not built on, or in most cases near the 1967 Green Line, but rather cuts deep into the West Bank, expanding Israel’s theft of Palestinian land and resources. In total, 85% of the Wall is located in the West Bank Image credit: Deliberation.info
 
by Stuart Littlewood
At its Annual General Meeting last weekend the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) threw out a proposal to seek Israel’s expulsion from the United Nations.

United States Ambassador to Israel Dan Shapiro at the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS) conference in Tel Aviv January 18,2016. Credit: Chen Galili

Former President Jimmy Carter, author of a new book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid,
is interviewed from his home in Plains, Georgia. He responds to a caller who asks questions concerning pressure put on the US political system and the resulting support of Israel.

Snapshot photo: Hoda Darwish, a 12-year-old from Gaza, was shot in the head and blinded by an Israeli sniper’s high-velocity bullet while sitting at her desk in a UN elementary school in Khan Younis in 2003.

A report by Sandra Jordan
If Americans Knew

Photo: Israeli security forces take position as Palestinians protest against Israel's separation wall in the West Bank city of Bethlehem on 18 December 2015 (AA).

Can this be true?
Something important and, freedom lovers may think, rather wonderful seems to have happened at the United Nations, and it went largely unreported in mainstream media. The UN General Assembly approved a draft resolution ‘Permanent sovereignty of the Palestinian people in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and of the Arab population in the occupied Syrian Golan over their natural resources’ (document A/70/480).

Despite Israel’s counteroffensive, boycott movement won some key victories in 2015. (Mark Esper/Polaris)

Photo: General Moshe Dayan