Israeli settlements

 
Israel to extract a heavy price if Palestinians join UN bodies, says minister
 
 by Stuart Littlewood
US-brokered negotiations with Israel, which started on 29 July 2013 and were to last nine months, are nearing their ignominious end. And Israel, the serial defaulter that it is, has reneged on the agreed release of 104 pre-Oslo prisoners in exchange for Palestine’s postponing joining international organizations to help achieve their long-overdue freedom.

by Ben White
(MEMO) – Last week, Israel found itself isolated and condemned in Geneva, as the United Nations Human Rights Council passed four damning resolutions, each by 46-1. The resolutions testify to grave violations of international law, including the Geneva Conventions, as well as systematic discrimination and wide-scale human rights abuses.

The BDS Movement does not have to dismantle the state of Israel, the state of Israel is not only dissembling its inherent Judaic roots of compassion and equity for all humans but delegitimizing the state itself…
 
William A. Cook               Intifada Palestine

(MEMO) – Mustafa Barghouti, the secretary-general of the Palestinian National Initiative movement, has estimated that Israel has incurred losses of around eight billion dollars due to the boycott campaign against illegal settlements, equivalent to 20 per cent of their GDP.

by PETER BELMONT
(Counterpunch) – The BDS movement (the movement for boycott, divestment, and sanctions against Israeli businesses and institutions) aims at ending the occupation, the settlements, Israeli discrimination against Palestinian Arabs, and Israel’s long-continuing exclusion from return to its territory of the Palestinians expelled and/or exiled by Israeli forces from that territory in the 1948 war.

With no hopes in sight for ending the Israeli Occupation, let alone ending the ever-expanding settlements, certainly for a “two states solution” time for Mahmoud Abbas to keep his often-stated promise (last one on December 28, 2012) to disband the PA/PLO and hand over the Keys to Bibi Netanyahu, Barack Obama and John Kerry.
 

An American rabbi has censured Israel’s apartheid expansionist policies in the occupied Palestinian territories, saying such measures run counter to Judaism, Press TV reports.
“Judaism does not permit us to oppress other people, steal their land, or in any manner being uncompassionate to the people,” Yisroel Dovid Weiss, a New York-based activist and spokesman for anti-Zionist group Neturei Karta, said in an exclusive interview with Press TV on Saturday.

 
The Council of the Royal Institute of British Architects has voted to call on the International Union Of Architects to exclude the Israeli Association of United Architects over its refusal to oppose Israel’s construction of illegal settlements on occupied Palestinian territory.
 Abe Hayeem, RIBA member and chair of Architects and Planners for Justice in Palestine, said:

by Alan Hart
A recent public opinion poll asked Americans which of two options they would favour if a two-state solution to the Israel/Palestine conflict was no longer on the table. (It is in the rhetoric of leaders and diplomats but not in reality). The two options were:
“The continuation of Israel’s Jewish majority (presumably this assumes permanent Israeli occupation of the West Bank and continuing ethnic cleansing of it by stealth) even if it means that Palestinians will not have citizenship and full rights.”

By Annie Robbins            Mondoweiss